The cameras will give school officials an important tool in correctly assigning blame when it comes to student fights, poor driving, vandalism and traffic accidents. The hope is that video evidence will result in savings on insurance claims, savings that may partially offset the $3.5 million, five-year price tag.
The school system last had operating cameras, on some but not all buses, in 2016.
School leaders have talked for years about buying new cameras but balked at the cost. In the meantime, surveillance cameras have become the norm in many other school bus fleets.
Technicians from Pro-Vision Solutions, the Michigan -based company supplying the technology, arrived Monday at the district’s bus depot on North Sherwood Drive to begin installing eight cameras per bus. They are installing them on 500 buses — about 20 additional “trail” buses will still lack cameras. The company has set a busy timetable to finish work over the next month.
On Thursday afternoon, speaking with local media, Transportation Director Rob Howle showed off a new bus and its new set of electronic eyes.
“It’s going to mean an increase in safety throughout the community,” Howle said.
Five cameras are being installed inside, one a dashcam, and three on the exterior. The small black objects are far less visible than the big video cameras of yesteryear.
Howle highlighted useful features of the new system: ultra high-definition 4K resolution; motion-sensor activation; audio; night vision; live remote access by district staff; built-in GPS; and video backup, both on board and via cloud storage.
Pro-Vision will store video captured by the cameras for up to 60 days and archive longer footage arising from incidents, at a cost of about $200,000 a year. The cameras start capturing video when they sense motion and cease filming 10 minutes after it stops.
Howle and other district staff will be able to watch drivers in real time from the Transportation Office on Choctaw Drive if there is an incident. The old camera system required staff to go out to the bus and retrieve an onboard hard drive before they could see what happened, he said.
One of the new cameras sits atop the main door of the bus, Howle said. That camera will allow his office to get ongoing head counts of how many students board each morning and afternoon, allowing the district to adjust routes more quickly to ensure fewer buses are operating at low capacity. Under-filled buses were flagged recently by an outside consultant, which was partially due to drivers not updating their superiors when children stopped riding.
Marvin Parks, a training safety officer, said the cameras will be a help in training new drivers, allowing them to review video after the fact of their actual driving. He recalled a recent accident where a driver failed to check his mirror and ended up hitting a car that made a late decision to turn with him.
“If you had been looking in that left mirror you would have seen that car,” Parks said.
Howle agreed the cameras will greatly improve training.
“Baton Rouge is a challenging place to drive, period, much less in a school bus,” he said.
Between 2012 and 2016, the school district relied on free camera systems supplied by another company, Force Multiplier Solutions. In addition to surveillance, the cameras were used to catch motorists violating bus stop safety laws. The money from resulting traffic tickets — the company collected 70 percent of each one — was supposed to finance the whole enterprise.
The company, however, did not collect nearly as much as anticipated — there were fewer violators than expected and even fewer who bothered to pay the tickets. The effort here collapsed in late 2017 after the company became embroiled in a bribery scandal in Dallas.
© 2025 The Advocate, Baton Rouge, La. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
