School District Approves Contract With Fleet Management Firm

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Samsara K-12 Fleet Management has quietly been testing its security systems in Ulysses, under the direction of the superintendent and transportation director, for the last few weeks. And soon, Samsara will have its eyes on every student, teacher and staff member who rides or drives any USD 214 vehicle.

“This is some things we’ve been sharing about - for lack of a better term - transportation systems, the GPS and the camera systems that they can put in the vehicles now for safety and for efficiency,” said superintendent Corey Burton. “(Transportation Director) Andy (Cole) started looking at this a couple of months ago.”

Matt Lima with Samsara joined the school board meeting from California via Zoom and explained what the company can do for the district. The process started 70 days ago and the company brought some equipment to Ulysses for a trial run.

“The goal at the end of the day is student safety,” Lima said. “K-12 is one of our biggest public sector accounts, starting from maintenance to transportation to admins to the board here in the room, it’s not an easy task. Providing student services takes a lot. The number one goal between all of K-12 throughout the United States is making sure each student arrives and returns home safely. That’s not an easy job, and every child is the most precious, and that puts a lot of pressure on you guys (the board).”

The company was founded in 2015 and has 20,000 customers, deploying one million devices worldwide using cloud-connected devices. For USD 214, that’s dash cams and GPS for every bus or other district vehicle, starting with real-time visibility, operational safety, immediate incident response and actual data.

The data collected is used to monitor vehicle health, and aid in accident investigations or with other incidents in a district vehicle.

The district already has cameras on buses and the Samsara system can tap into that. So not only is there a dash cam facing outside, there is a camera facing the seats in the event there is an event involving a student.

“Your camera’s a forward-facing one, and you’ll catch basically most of the things going on,” Burton said. “But there are some of our buses that have multiple camera angles that will be plugged into the system.”

Trustee Mike Meyer asked if that crossed any confidentiality lines for the drivers or students, and Burton said that the district would never share that information.

“The only people who would have access to that information is Andy or the admin team,” Burton added.

Cole said that if there was an incident involving law enforcement, students not directly involved in the incident could be blurred out.

Cole also mentioned an incident where a bus broke down outside Scott City, and it took him 40 minutes to find out where they were anger them help. With the new system, they would know instantly.

“That delay is what I’m concerned about,” Cole said. “Just n the buses we cover 78,000 miles per year, and that’s not including Suburbans and vans, and you know where we go. So there’s a lot, efficiency-wise, that we’ll be able to pick up on as a transportation group.

“I don’t know how much more transparent we can be with our kids’ parents than hey, we are absolutely caring about what happens to your kids because we want to know instantly when something goes wrong. This is how we do that.”

The trustees approved a 3-year contract at $14,176.80 per year.