Company: Huntsville Independent School District, Huntsville, TX
Operation: Using 100 school buses and 50 to 60 service vehicles to support 6,300 K-12 students
Problem:
Efficiency is the name of the game when it comes to school fleet operations, as every dollar saved in terms of fuel expenditure, including maintenance and repair costs, is a dollar that can be spent more directly on the educational needs of students.
And it’s for that reason the Huntsville School District partnered with Presidio to leverage Presidio’s Internet of Things (IoT) Smart Transport architecture. The goal is to generate savings for the school system’s 100 buses through what Shawn Rahn, the company’s vice president of IoT, calls a “connected community” that integrates a lot of disparate hardware, software and data into one holistic package.
“Instead of using three or four systems to provide navigation and vehicle tracking, video recording, and diagnostic data capture, we use one system linked back to home base via a 3G/4G WiFi network,” he explains.
A GPS vehicle tracking system utilizing geofencing tracks the location of a bus, and live telematics enables the fleet to monitor driver behavior and bus condition.
Presidio’s open architecture provides an economical way to tie different products into one network stream of data. “That way, you’re getting fuel economy data, bus location data, and engine diagnostic data, all via one system,” Rahn explains.
With real-time telematics, Huntsville’s technicians can check on more than 2,000 different readings from the engine control module and provide the driver with more accurate information about what’s happening. “The bottom line is a reduction in maintenance costs,” says Tim Hooks, director of transportation for Huntsville.
So, could the telematics network also be used as a learning tool for students?
Solution:
The Huntsville School District is large, and a fair number of students have long bus rides, some up to over an hour one way. On top of that, many students from low-income neighborhoods don’t have home Internet access.
By using the WiFi connectivity installed on the school buses, Huntsville found it could extend its classrooms to students with long bus rides, giving them time to study while in transit. In addition, the school system is working on a program that will allow buses to be parked in certain neighborhoods overnight and on weekends in order to provide WiFi connectivity to students.
“The school system initiated a ‘one to one’ program to provide laptops to all its students,” says Bob Daughrity, director of education solutions at Presidio. “By extending the classroom via the WiFi on the buses and via a school-controlled Internet portal, the students obtain more learning resources.”
“We really wanted to be able to provide wireless access to our students, because some students are on the bus quite the length of time,” adds Dr. Howell Wright, Huntsville’s superintendent. “For many students without Internet at home, it would be their only opportunity to connect online.”
