Cache County School District

Cache County School District Improves School Bus Operations and Safety Experience with Smart Fleet Management Technologies from Zonar.

Serving schools in 2 districts for 100 years, the Cache County School District has been a technology advocate and early adopter, recognizing the value that technology brings to the community it serves. It was the first school district in their State to deploy GPS on its school buses. However, as technology advanced, the school bus fleet’s ability to evolve and gain new capabilities seemed to slow down. The systems in use worked for what they were originally designed to do. However, when it came to leveraging the data for new features or capabilities, the team was limited. Although they had added in-house technical resources, they did not have access to the data or the flexibility to customize it to support their changing requirements.

An audit experience with the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) was the wakeup call for the Cache County School District. Their existing system did not meet the full needs for payroll, operations, and documentation management, and they could not get access to the original source data they needed to complete the audit requirements. It was time for the district to reexamine how it was leveraging technology.

Enter Zonar

Right away, the Zonar solutions demonstrated their flexibility, to the school district’s benefit. The school district fleet team was initially using the Zonar 2010 Electronic Verified Inspection Reporting (EVIR®) tool to conduct pre- and post-trip inspections. Addressing the DOL audit results, the school district team collaborated with the Zonar team to re-configure the 2010 to accommodate all of the fleet’s various pay rates and also establish it as their official time clock. With this system, bus drivers and other staff would use their individual ID cards in their time documentation, providing more accurate and real-time updates. When the school district demonstrated this new, customized system to the DOL, the response was positive – the DOL team fully supported the change and cleared the audit. In addition to the compliance benefits, the Cache County School District quickly saw a financial return on their technology investment. The year they began using the reconfigured 2010 as their time clock, they realized a 9-percent reduction in labor costs – an approximate $180,000 savings for bus driver salaries alone – an important factor for the district’s ongoing success. During an economic downturn that saw many other school districts cutting their services, the ROI enabled the Cache County School District to both maintain their high levels of service and support their entire employee base.

In addition to compliance and cost efficiencies, Zonar technology has helped the Cache County School District improve operations in other ways. With Zonar, the school district was able to leverage the direct access to its data and write new programs to support tracking, reporting, and payroll documentation across multiple job classifications. The school district was also able to customize the Zonar solutions to generate billing for all of the activity trips that the school bus fleet provides. This enables drivers to easily and efficiently track and report all of their trips – sometimes multiple per bus per day – which has saved a significant number of manual billing hours since the solutions have been deployed.

Zonar technologies also help the school district provide peace of mind to its community members, providing historic and real-time data as needed to verify questions, for instance, when a bus is running late or to confirm whether or not a child is still on the bus.

The key to this ongoing success has been the strong support from the Zonar team and the company’s desire to create a true partnership with the Cache County School District.