ASHLAND — Ashland City Schools’ buses have a new feature aimed at keeping students safe.
The district installed exterior cameras on their fleet of “route buses,” or the 17 buses that the district uses on a daily basis. Cameras haven’t been installed on the spare buses, but the district hopes to do that down the road.
The cameras help catch people who run the buses’ stop signs, a task that used to fall to drivers.
Doug Shipper, Ashland City Schools’ transportation director, said people “run the red” with buses everywhere. It’s a dangerous and potentially deadly problem, and one that Ashland City Schools wanted to be proactive about solving, rather than reactive.
“The bottom line is we’re here to protect our most precious cargo: the kids,” Shipper said.
Why now?
Ashland City Schools was able to install the cameras on its buses thanks to a school safety grant from the state.
Ben Spieldenner, the district’s director of professional development for tech, applied for the grant and received $225,000, according to Supt. Steve Paramore.
Spieldenner said he and Philip McNaull, the district’s technology coordinator, evaluated what needed to be done with help from the district’s school resource officer. Spieldenner wrote the application in the fall of 2022. The money had to be spent by December 2023.
The district re-evaluated and renovated key fobs to enter some of its buildings; installed lighting and cameras at exterior points for some of the buildings; added external PA systems and purchased communications accessories; upgraded interior camera systems for the school buses; and installed the buses’ exterior cameras.
Altogether, the upgrades to the buses’ interior systems and adding the exterior cameras cost about $60,000, according to Paramore.
Prior to having the cameras, Paramore said the district heard stories of people running the stop signs, which violates state law.
“I get people are in a hurry, but it’s a law,” Paramore said. “So, we set out to enhance safety.”
Shipper said he’s already heard positive feedback about the cameras from his bus drivers.
How it works
Shipper said when somebody runs a bus’s stop sign, the drivers come in and tell him that a violation happened. There’s a “panic button” on the bus. When a driver presses it, it marks the time when somebody runs the stop sign on the camera’s hard drive.
Shipper then pulls the hard drive, looks at the video and takes a snapshot of the front and back license plates of a car that ran the stop sign.
He reports the violation to the Ashland Police Department if it happened within city limits. Outside city limits, those reports go to the Ohio State Highway Patrol.
As of Feb. 12, all the violations that had taken place had happened within city limits, Shipper said. He’d sent six into the Ashland Police Department, and had another two to review.
Shipper said it’s important, however, to note that the cameras were installed specifically for stop sign violators, and that’s what they’re being used for. They aren’t in place to track other traffic violations.
“We’re not working for the police department,” he said.
Police chief Dave Lay said since Jan. 24, the police department had issued three citations for people who ran a school bus’s stop sign — one on Jan. 25, one on Jan. 26 and the last on Feb. 2.
Before that, Ashland Police Department’s last citation for running a school bus’s stop sign happened in May of 2023. Lay said he appreciates the district collecting the data, and that any evidence they offer can help the police prosecute those cases.
“It’s become an eye-opening fact that a number of people run those stop signs,” Shipper said.
