MOUNT VERNON — Mount Vernon City Schools has installed 180-degree cameras on its buses to capture clearer footage of both danger on the roads and misconduct on buses.
The district had the cameras from ProVision, a company based out of Michigan, installed between Nov. 15 and 19 in the district’s 23 route buses to replace the roughly 7-year-old cameras previously on the buses, said Mount Vernon City Schools’ director of transportation Todd Conant.
Superintendent Bill Seder said the new camera system cost the district $65,502.70, which it paid for using Permanent Improvement money.
The district has 31 buses overall, including eight spare buses which did not have camera replacements and remain using the cameras that were on all buses previously, Conant said.
Each route bus now has four cameras on the inside, a dashboard camera that faces out the front windshield, and a stop-arm camera with two lenses, which automatically captures video of vehicles that illegally pass the bus when it’s stopped and has its warning lights flashing.
“That right there could be our biggest safety saving grace,” Conant said of the stop-arm cameras.
People driving a vehicle on either side of the road are required to stop when a school bus stops to pick up or drop off a student until the bus resumes motion under Ohio Revised Code. Drivers who fail to stop could face a $500 fine and/or have their license suspended for up to a year if the driver is identified in court by the bus driver.
“We’re more concerned about the safety of the kids at their bus stops than of getting the license plates of cars or identifying drivers,” Conant said. “These cameras will do all that for us.”
The front- and back-facing lenses on the stop-arm camera capture both the license plate of passing vehicles as well as video of the drivers’ faces.
According to Ohio State Highway Patrol, 5,859 traffic crashes involving school buses were reported in Ohio from 2016-2020, and during the same time period OSHP troopers wrote 13,943 citations for passing a stopped school bus and other school zone violations.
Mount Vernon’s camera system no longer requires transportation staff and bus drivers to physically remove a storage device from a bus. They can instead automatically download the video files remotely once the bus is within range of the WiFi network, Dill said.
Bus drivers are also able to mark timestamps on videos in real time, said bus driver Scott Mickley who drives a route for Mount Vernon.
“I can hit a panic button and it marks the video, so you don’t even have to search and look for that,” Mickley said.
The panic button is located at the front of the bus by the driver seat and can be pressed as an event is happening, whether it be another vehicle running a red light or a fight between students breaking out inside the bus. The cameras also capture audio.
Similar to Conant, Mickley’s main concern is the danger of drivers illegally passing the bus.
Mickley has been driving school buses and working in transportation maintenance for upwards of 20 years, currently for Mount Vernon and previously for Danville. Mickley said he has increasingly seen reckless driving and traffic violations over the years, and now sees these incidents as frequent as every few days.
“It’s definitely worse than what it used to be,” Mickley said looking back on his decades of work. “And people are in a hurry now, and I feel they’re distracted.”
Mickley said he often sees people looking down at cell phones or speeding by buses.
Mickley, Conant and director of technology Matthew Dill said the videos are intended to be used both by the district for internal review and turned over to local law enforcement to report illegal acts, which is the continuation of communication throughout the past several years between the district, Ohio State Highway Patrol and city police to prevent red light runners.
The cameras are not a proactive measure but rather a way to more quickly and efficiently resolve issues — student misconduct, traffic violations, etc. — after they happen, and potentially dissuade people from misconduct due to repercussions, Dill said.
Dill and Conant said as of Nov. 30, they had heard anecdotal reports from bus drivers of people running red lights since the new cameras were installed, but have not yet done anything with footage because district staff has not been formally trained on the system.
Transportation staff and school administrators are scheduled to undergo a virtual training Dec. 6, Dill said.
Other school districts in Ohio have also added stop-arm cameras to their bus fleets in recent years (i.e. Hudson City School District, Boardman Local Schools, Miamisburg City Schools) as well as more than 20 states countrywide.
