The program — a collaboration between the school district, the sheriff’s office and a private company called Bus Patrol — started in May 2024 when Bus Patrol installed camera systems on the district’s fleet of school buses to catch drivers illegally passing stopped school buses with extended stop arms.
A Miami Herald/Tributary investigation found that many Miami-Dade drivers were ticketed by the school district’s bus safety program thought they’d done nothing wrong. They were driving on the opposite side of a raised median from a stopped school bus. That’s legal, but they got the $225 ticket anyway.
The investigation also found that when drivers tried to fight the violations, they were stuck in limbo waiting for a court date that never came. Often drivers would just pay the fine.
Sheriff Rosie Cordero-Stutz suspended her department’s participation last May because of significant errors in the citations that were issued that she said “undermine the fairness and the trust of the system.”
The decision to reintroduce the program was approved by the school district, but at a Friday press conference Cordero-Stutz said that changes made by the Legislature on how BusPatrol can operate make her comfortable that the same issues that plagued the program won’t arise again.
“Those concerns helped lead to clarification at the state level,” Cordero-Stutz said.
The most significant change the Legislature made is mandating that the hearings to contest tickets happen within the school district, which will collaborate with the Florida Department of Administrative Hearings, said Steve Randazzo, chief growth officer for BusPatrol. Randazzo said the criteria for issuing tickets has also been overhauled.
Sheriff’s office deputies will weigh video evidence recorded by the bus cameras against a questionnaire to determine if a violation that warrants a ticket occurred, Randazzo said at the press conference.
The cost of the program will be paid for through a combination of a subscription fee for the technology installed on the buses and a cut of the ticket fines, school officials and BusPatrol said. Specifically, the district will pay $225 per bus, per month for the tech, Randazzo said. The company will get $65 for every $225 ticket issued.
The program officially re-launches May 4, with a 14-day educational period in which violations will result in warnings, not fines. The grace window is over and fines become effective on May 18, said Elmo Lugo, a school district spokesman.
A PROGRAM PLAGUED BY ISSUES
The Herald/Tribune investigation also revealed the contract with BusPatrol was signed hastily by the school district without a bidding process. The contract, which generated revenue for the district, was signed just 12 days after the school board asked staff to do a “feasibility study” on the program.
Revenue numbers provided by the school district indicated the program was flagging more than 407 paid violations per day, seven days a week, generating $19.5 million in the first six months of the program. In the first few months, more than 100,000 tickets were issued.
The school district conducted two audits into the program to determine what went wrong. The first revealed that Miami-Dade County Public Schools failed to appropriately vet its contract with BusPatrol because the district’s policy allows revenue-generating contracts under $50,000 to proceed without a competitive bidding process.
“We found a lack of evidence that BusPatrol and the overall Program were sufficiently vetted prior to M-DCPS entering a contract with the company,” the audit stated. BusPatrol was “advertised and communicated to M-DCPS a turnkey program that provides numerous services including coordination with law enforcement and adjudication and court services.” But ultimately the auditor found that the district was not prepared for the scope of coordination needed between the various agencies involved.
A second audit found that faulty paperwork led to the blanket dismissal of thousands of violations from school-bus cameras in Miami-Dade, but the cited drivers never got word they were off the hook.
Before the bus safety camera program was suspended last year, BusPatrol was mailing out violations with incorrect information. Those errors — which had some tickets showing a lower fine than the $344 required by Florida law and others bearing the wrong ticket numbers — resulted in a Miami-Dade judge wiping out 5,400 violations last spring that drivers were fighting in court. Drivers never were informed.
The audit further pointed out that more than 40,000 uncontested violations were never converted to citations within the court system, leaving the district unable to collect about $10 million in potential revenue.
©2026 Miami Herald. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
