Zonar and Advanced Transportation Help Students Get to and from School After Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico
Seattle Wash. – January 3, 2018 – Zonar, the leader in smart fleet management technology, announced today it is working with Advanced Transportation, a school bus contractor serving Puerto Rico, in effort to rebuild Puerto Rico’s school transportation in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria.
Puerto Rico’s school system is still reeling from the impact of Hurricane Maria, which made landfall in mid-September this year. Of the over 1,000 public schools on the island, dozens were badly damaged, 190 have been serving as community centers and more than 70 others are used to shelter families who lost their homes.
As some schools start to reopen for classes, Zonar is committed to helping school bus contractors ensure that the estimated 345,000 students arrive at their respective locations as safely as possible. Zonar will provide Advanced Transportation with financial relief for technology solutions that improve safety, maintenance and efficiency of school bus transportation. Zonar’s technology and support will help safeguard every student passenger served by Advanced Transportation while on the way to school or home, giving parents and schools peace of mind. Zonar is also donating to Operation Aqua. Operation Aqua has a mission to purchase and distribute 100,000 individual water filtration systems for households and classrooms, and 50 large-capacity clean-water devices to a network of nonprofit organizations, union offices, schools and other community-based groups across Puerto Rico to provide stable and reliable sources of safe water in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria.
“Ensuring that children are safely transported to and from school has always been of the utmost importance to Zonar,” said H. Kevin Mest, senior vice president and general manager of passenger services at Zonar. “When tragedy strikes, we are not only compelled to help support our customers but the community and children they serve. We hope that there is an opportunity that comes out of this tragedy where the rebuilding process can lead to a better school transportation system across Puerto Rico.”
“We look forward to continuing to work with Zonar and appreciate that their support and commitment to student transportation in Puerto Rico mirrors that of Advanced Transportation,” said Gandhi Miranda, project development manager at Advanced Transportation. “Puerto Rico has many challenges ahead as it continues to rebuild. We aim through our partnership with Zonar to do our part by ensuring that the community we serve knows that the children are getting to and from school safely.”
Founded in 2001, Zonar has pioneered smart fleet management solutions throughout vocational, pupil, mass transit and commercial trucking industries. Zonar helps fleets of all sizes maximize the use of their assets with solutions dedicated to improving compliance, efficiency, maintenance, ridership visibility, safety and tracking. Cloud-based services with open API’s drive Zonar’s smart fleet solutions by making it easy for fleet owners and managers to stay connected to their fleets and drivers and operators to dispatch. Headquartered in Seattle and majority-owned by technology company Continental, Zonar also has a Technology Development Center in downtown Seattle, a regional office in Cincinnati, and a distribution center outside of Atlanta. For more information about Zonar, go to www.zonarsystems.com
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