RENO, Nev. – During a Monday session at STN EXPO West, Vivek Garg, COO of Zūm who previously spent 11 years as an army officer, spoke on his drive “to make transportation a better experience for our students.” He appraised the school bus industry’s traditional prioritization of on-time performance, sharing the story of Priya, a student whose pre-test anxiety was rooted in bus uncertainty, to illustrate why Zūm now prioritizes the “ready to learn” metric.

Drawing on a study by NORC at the University of Chicago, he revealed that 54 percent of students experience transportation-related anxiety, resulting in 55 billion lost instructional minutes and $15 billion in annual losses – despite school buses moving 26 million students daily, making it the nation’s largest mass transit system and the second-largest ticket item in district budgets.

Zūm’s Connected Mobility Experience (CMX), deployed in 18 states and supporting 139 million bus rides, unifies students, families, drivers, dispatchers, operations managers, board members and superintendents. The platform democratizes bus ride feedback, enabling parents to rate rides even if they don’t speak English – amassing 1.7 million ratings with a 4.9-star average – and achieves over 98 percent on-time performance.

In Kansas City Public Schools, Zūm CMX drove an 86 percent decrease in transportation-related absenteeism, a 2.5 percent increase in attendance, a 150 percent rise in athletics and field trip participation, improved graduation rates, and a leap in daily ridership from 4,900 to 9,100 out of 10,000 students.

“When your transportation becomes reliable, when a family knows that this bus ride is going to happen or that they can plan when there is an issue, these are the outcomes,” Garg explained.

He took attendees on a virtual tour through the Zūm CMX platform, showing how it empowers dispatchers and operations managers with color-coded dashboards that highlight delayed buses, automates standby driver assignment and suggests the best drivers for split routes. Outdated processes involving binders of paper route sheets and text messages to drivers are replaced by real-time driver tablet notifications, including street views of new stops and navigation along familiar routes. Drivers start getting paid when they check-in, and schools receive real-time drop-off updates. The system instantly notifies parents of driver changes, complete with the substitute’s name and years of experience for transparency and reassurance.

Zūm CMX is not a far-off promise but a live, robust solution, used by Boston Public Schools and in complex urban environments like San Francisco, where over 200 school buses run three daily routes back-to-back. By centering the “ready to learn” metric, unifying all stakeholders, and leveraging technology, Zūm eliminates anxiety and transforms transportation into a reliable, connected experience that fosters student success.

“Are you ready to reimagine school transportation systems for your school district?” Garg asked attendees.

Written with the assistance of AI from a live transcript.

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RENO, Nev. – As a leader in school bus safety technology, BusPatrol CEO Karoon Monfared showcased the company’s stop arm enforcement program and track record of protecting over 2 million children on 40,000 buses across 27 states.

Monfared’s presentation, part of the Bus Technology Summit series at STN EXPO West, blended personal anecdotes – such as a heartfelt birthday wish for his son Liam – with an engaging “10-star experience” experiment involving an audience member and her favorite restaurant, Black and Blue, to illustrate BusPatrol’s ethos of understanding, attention to detail, and caring.

BusPatrol’s community-first approach is shaped by listening to partners like Keba Baldwin, director of transportation at Prince George’s County Public Schools in Maryland and STN’s 2025 Transportation Director of the Year, as well as early collaborators in Pennsylvania, Virginia and New York. The company trains its field service technicians on every school bus make and model, and leverages data to identify illegal passing hotspots for safer route planning. Monfared emphasized the importance of continually asking partners questions about protecting every child and using data-driven insights, ensuring technology is purpose-built for school buses rather than adapted from other industries.

“The technology around us is evolving at unbelievable speed, but it hasn’t been built from the ground up,” he said. “Our video management solutions on the inside of the school bus have been built from the ground up with student transportation in mind.”

The session addressed the daily challenges student transportation teams face, including integrating technology into workflows, urgency in bus yards, and the manual, detective-like process of retrieving video footage. This involves finding buses, removing hard drives, cropping, clipping, and delivering footage, all of which can take hours or days and delay incident response. BusPatrol’s new Beyond Enforcement+ offering launching this fall, offers a modern incident management platform with privacy built into every step, secure sharing with school staff, and a connected, streamlined workflow. Since BusPatrol’s end-to-end technology ownership enables seamless integration with other systems and rapid improvements, it avoids patchwork solutions from multiple companies.

“We’ve reimagined every step of the entire process, from detection to delivery, so you can get your typical video in about three minutes,” Monfared explained. “That means faster decisions, faster communication and a faster safety response.”

He also highlighted the violator-funded enforcement model and the “BusPatrol difference” – a commitment to affordable innovation and purpose-built solutions for the industry’s “precious cargo” of children.

The audience of student transporters, often the first to arrive at work and last to leave, was recognized for their dedication, with millions of parents trusting them daily. Monfared confirmed that BusPatrol takes the privilege of partnership seriously, working “shoulder to shoulder” with student transporters to prevent illegal passing incidents and deliver fast, effective solutions for the next era of student safety.

Written with assistance of AI from a session transcript.

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