Mission

The mission of the United States Yellow School Bus Project is to
equip all 418,000 school buses in the U.S. with technology that will
accomplish three goals:

• Protect America’s children as they go to and from school.
• Provide every community with a way to more effectively monitor for and defend
  against questionable activities.
• Protect our Country

Goal One—Protecting Our Children

Our first mission is to protect the 24 million children that ride yellow school buses to and
from school each day All of us would agree that our country’s most precious and vulnerable
resource is our children.  The safety of our children is our paramount concern.  
Internationally and nationally, current events indicate that the threats to our children have
escalated.  For many parents the school bus has become a necessary evil.  Bus stops have
become hangouts where children are totally vulnerable and unsupervised.  The bus ride
has become a potentially volatile situation where 20 to 30 children are placed within a
confined space, with limited supervision, and very little protection.   Our school bus drivers
are placed in the precarious position of delivering our children to and from school safely in
the midst of pure chaos. If we add the potential threat of terrorism into this scenario, then
tragedy is almost inevitable. School bus violence is escalating. The media has reported
many disturbing stories about the bullying, fighting and other forms of harassment our
children face each day on school buses.  

Recently a Baltimore City student was “pushed” or fell out of a school bus’ emergency door
landing on the street.  The bus driver reported that the students on the bus were so rowdy
he was unaware of the accident and sadly did not stop the bus until the next scheduled bus
stop.  As a result school officials could not even determine how the accident happened!
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Additionally several incidents have occurred where children fell asleep on their bus and
were trapped in the buses for hours when the drivers drove the buses to their lots assuming
all of the children had safely exited the bus at their normal destinations.
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Finally, consider the following scenario:  a school bus loaded with children is midway
through its normal route when armed terrorists or disgruntled students with automatic
weapons suddenly board the bus at a scheduled stop. The bus driver is directed to
continue in traffic to an unknown destination.
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The YSB technology will help detect, prevent and solve these problems by providing each
bus driver a way to quickly communicate with school officials and provide them with
information needed to:

• accurately identify and punish students who engage in dangerous activity on the
  buses.
  
• determine when and where each student entered and exited the bus
  
• track deviations in school bus routes that might be the result of a violent incident.