The Suwannee County School District (SCSD) recently approved to go into a contract agreement with Seon to provide new cameras, which will provide video footage for every school bus in the school district.

According to Director of Transportation Chris Landrum Seon has agreed to provide, “Web-based wireless and automatic video management software to monitor video system health, automatically download video alarms, and search video by time and location.” Seon’s camera system records video and audio on each school bus, which will allow the bus driver to focus on the road ahead while still being able to identify any discipline or safety issues that happen on the bus. Each bus will have two high definition cameras. One camera captures the road that the bus is traveling on, while another camera records activity inside of the school bus.

With the new technology, video will upload automatically from each bus. This allows transportation to gain the film footage without the bus driver physically handing in the film footage. The current system requires drivers to hand in the film footage whenever an incident is in dispute. Landrum says the current system causes a problem because the Transportation Department does not know something is wrong with the camera until the footage is turned in. Therefore, if the camera has not been working, the incident in question may not be on tape.

The new system from Seon not only will download film footage from the bus it will also send an alert notifying Landrum that one of the cameras is not working. Landrum says this will be key in staying up to date on when a technician needs to work on the cameras. Landrum says, “We can offer a better service to the community by having better quality videos. This helps protect not only the kids, but our employees as well.”

Landrum says the cameras will be up and ready to go for the beginning of the 2017–2018 school year.