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POLL: Sask. Rivers wants cameras on its buses

Mar 11, 2015 | 7:02 AM

The Saskatchewan Rivers School Division is now considering outfitting all school buses with routes in its fleet with exterior and interior surveillance cameras this fall following a pilot project.

The pilot project began in November and finished at the end of January. One bus on the school division’s rural routes had the cameras installed on its interior and exterior.

“In most cases, it’s not for the student behaviour on the bus, but rather for drivers that go through where the bus stops and has its arms extended, they go past the bus when they’re supposed to stop. Those are the things that concern us in terms of student safety and that’s what we’ve seen on the buses,” said Donald Lloyd, the chief financial officer of the school division.

Through the pilot project, the school division found that when the buses stop, traffic is supposed to stop in both directions for the students to be let off of the vehicles.

“We’re noticing on a number of our cameras, we’re finding that drivers actually go through the stop arms, so surveillance from our point of view is both interior and exterior,” Lloyd said. Within Prince Albert’s city limits, the buses cannot use the stop arms

Sask. Rivers has designated funding for the surveillance cameras for its entire fleet in the coming school year’s budget. In order for this to move forward, the school division’s board of directors will have to finalize it. This process is expected to conclude by June 30.

The cost has yet to be determined, and that too will be finalized during the school division’s budget process.

“Student safety is paramount,” Lloyd said. “By knowing that we have drivers that aren’t stopping for stop arms, then we can work with law enforcement to ensure those drivers are ticketed.”

The school division plans to make drivers aware of the need to stop when a school bus has stopped through advertising.

But according to Maurice Gregoire, president and lead designer of Teknisult, the company that managed the pilot project, the infractions in Prince Albert fell soon after the pilot project launched. He credited an awareness campaign for the reduction in infractions.

“With smaller locations, like if we’re right in the middle of an urban centre, like a major city, it has a little bit less impact, but if we’re in more of a rural environment, word of mouth happens very fast,” he added.

Teknisult’s Prince Albert data was gathered over the course of 64 school days.

The Winnipeg-based company installed the cameras on the two buses. It had offered cameras on a pilot basis to 35 school divisions across Canada. Sask Rivers was one of the school divisions that responded.

In Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta, Teknisult reviewed about 27,000 videos. About 3,800 videos showed had vehicles in vicinity of the bus outfitted with a camera, and within those videos, 423 of them contained footage of a violation. This translates to an 11 per cent probability of an offence occurring.

The results of the national data are contained in the report compiled by Teknisult, included below.

tjames@panow.com

On Twitter: @thiajames