Tracker initiative gets children to school safely

Tracker has embarked on a school safety initiative involving leading schools in Gauteng. The pilot programme allows parents to view the exact whereabouts of their child as they journey to and from school and to extra-curricular activities. A total of eight schools in the Norhern Suburbs of Gauteng will benefit in the intitial phase with a view to expanding to schools across the country.

The school buses are all fitted with on board tracking units which feed data into Tracker’s portal, allowing parents to easily monitor positions for the specific bus their child is being transported on, in real time. The route of each branded bus is shown sequentially on a map display, for a selected time period. Play-back functionality enables parents to re-trace the steps of a bus should anything out of the ordinary happen.

Charlette Roetz, General Manager of Marketing for Tracker says, “Through research we identified that many parents are concerned about the lack of visibility around their child’s safety when in transit in school vehicles. Often parents wait for hours at the school to pick their child up after sports, for example, not knowing exactly where that child is. This solves that problem for parents.”

The timing of the pilot phase co-incides with the start of the new school term. Trackers product and innovation team are already monitoring the buses and activity on the portal to further enhance capabilities and the functionality to expand the offering.

The buses serve the following schools:

• St Peters Boys Prep
• St Peters Girls Prep
• St Peters College
• St Stithians Girls Prep
• St Stithians Girls College
• St Stithians Boys Prep
• St Stithians Boys College
• Redhill and Grayston Prep

Parents from other schools are welcome to contact Tracker to enquire about inclusion of their child’s school.