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By Alice Gerard
Senior Contributing Writer
Three school buses will be fitted with stop arm cameras as a pilot project, beginning late in March.
The Grand Island Central School District Board of Education voted to approve the pilot project with Safety Vision Mobile Video Surveillance Solutions at the Jan. 6 meeting at Grand Island High School.
According to Bob Merkle, assistant superintendent for school business and finance, the company will install the equipment and will collect the data. At the end of the pilot period, a decision will be made about the effectiveness of this program.
There is “no cost unless we choose to continue,” Merkle said. “If we decide not to move forward, there is zero cost to the district.”
Currently, both the Buffalo and the Niagara Falls school districts use school bus stop arm cameras to photograph vehicles that pass stopped school buses. In Buffalo, the program has been in effect since October 2023. Originally, drivers received warning letters in the mail. As of October 2024, drivers were ticketed for passing a stopped school bus.
Grand Island Central Schools Superintendent Dr. Brian Graham explained, “Other districts, including Niagara Falls and Buffalo, have this. It’s just not the same company that we’re looking to pilot with. My understanding is that it is a deterrent. The goal isn’t really to make money; it’s to deter the behavior of drivers passing the buses. I saw a news story recently about Buffalo. They have so many indicators of people passing school buses since they installed their cameras. It was quite shocking how prevalent it is. It’s really about changing people’s behavior.”
The company that the Niagara Falls and Buffalo school districts use is BusPatrol. Grand Island had originally planned for BusPatrol to install cameras on its school buses at no cost to the school district. In September, however, the plan changed.
“We originally had worked with BusPatrol on (the stop arm bus cameras),” Merkle said then. “We were getting ready to do the installation. Then, they came back and said, instead of everything being completely free, it was going to be $1,250 set-up fee per bus and then $250 per bus per month, amounting to more than a half a million dollars over the five-year term of the contract.”
Merkle provided an update last week. “After that, Dr. Graham and I worked to try to find other companies that did some things similar, and I was able to find this company (with Safety Vision Mobile Video Surveillance Solutions) through a couple contacts, and we liked what they had to offer.”
Issues with enforcement resulted in a delay of the pilot program, Graham said. “There were definitely some downstate people who fought against the citations that they were receiving. They cleaned that up. There shouldn’t be any issue legally. It’s a tighter law now, so it will be more difficult for people to fight (a ticket).”
“I think it will bring awareness and it will be a deterrent,” Board Vice President Sue Marston said. “There will always be people who will fight a ticket.”
The school district has no enforcement mechanism, however. Late in September of 2023, when the idea of installing school bus stop arm cameras was first proposed, Graham explained, “We need the town and the school to work in collaboration to make this happen. I believe that the town would have to be the agent to send out citations to individuals who run the stop sign on the bus.”