PALOS HEIGHTS, Ill. - One Illinois school district is using the same type of GPS technology you could use on a road trip to keep track of its students who ride school buses. Officials say it's all in the name of student safety.
At Chippewa Elementary school every student is accounted for and officials will also know when each child arrives back home.
A new tracking system called Z-Pass is at work on the district's buses and it didn't take long for kids to figure it out.
"You just walk up there, go like that, and it just makes like a little beep and then you can just sit down," says student Joe Walsh. "If it's the wrong tag then you probably can't go."
The $16,000 system works with a simple detection card attached to each child's backpack and a reader device in each of the district's buses.
District superintendent Kathleen Casey insisted on getting Z-Pass as soon as she heard about it.
"It's a back-up system for us so that we can find that child at any given time if we need to," says Casey. "And, I think it's just alleviated a lot of our parents' fears that they (the children) are well taken care of."
"I did have a child that got off at a friend's house and it was still a phone call to a girlfriend's house," says parent Ann O'Brien. "But at that moment, that moment is a tough moment."
But now answers can be had in mere seconds when dealing with those tough moments.
"It's a great way to utilize technology in this day and age. Everybody should be doing that," adds Donna Pawlak, the mother of a student. "Any outlet that we have for the safety of our children we should be doing."
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