Sponsored content from Safety Vision
In South Texas, Sharyland Independent School District is responsible for safely transporting over 10,000 students every day. However, Sharyland was one of the few districts in the country that had no cameras on their buses, despite the fact that cameras have become an industry standard. Since student discipline was one of their main challenges, and the fact that schools are held liable in many cases, the district felt that having cameras installed would be a great asset.
Transportation Director Francisco Perez, Jr., said, “We have been very fortunate. With some of our schools being so close to the International Bridge, we have had issues with the illegals crossing the border. We’ve never had a serious incident, but we felt it was time to install cameras which would provide a safer, more secure ride for our students, and help with lessening distractions for our drivers.”
“This was our first venture with cameras,” says Perez, “and our experience with Safety Vision has been excellent. Hunter Guzman answered all our questions, and if he wasn’t sure of the answer, he found it.”
The Sharyland district chose Safety Vision’s Observer 4000 HYB hybrid video recorder for their fleet of 73 buses. This unique system is designed to work with three types of video cameras simultaneously. There are cameras at each end of the bus that look down the aisle, and one that looks down the stepwell. Using the latest Analog High Definition (AHD) technology, HD images are generated at an analog price.
Sharyland’s three-camera system was a perfect fit for their budget, and features like blur or zoom are easy to use, so employees have little difficulty learning the system. Another feature that Sharyland thought was important was the wireless download. As soon as a bus pulls in, the video is downloaded automatically, so a mechanic doesn’t have to go to each bus and pull the SD card. Finding out if certain students boarded or disembarked is also easier now, since the video is also marked each time the stop-arm comes out. Therefore, if there is a question about what happened at the fourth stop on the route, it is easily found.
The Observer 4000 HYB has a panic button feature which marks the video 30 seconds before and five minutes after an incident, and marks the corresponding day on the calendar in orange so that the event is easily found.
“We saw our investment recovered almost immediately,” says Perez. “We had the system installed in June, and in the first few weeks of the new school year we had situations occur on the bus, such as student throwing items inside the bus and hitting another student or items left behind and taken by another student. Having the cameras on the buses helped us to resolve these situations and find the guilty party, something that would have taken longer if not for the cameras. The cameras have been a great investment”.