Broken Arrow Public Schools in Oklahoma has widened an RFID pilot that logs pupils on and off the school bus. The cards are clipped to backpacks and read at the bus door as a child boards or gets off, and each read feeds a time-stamped record to parents through the district’s bus tracking app.
From one school to six
The scheme began as a single-site trial at Cecil Rhoades Elementary, whose principal, Nathan Akehurst, volunteered the school as the test bed. KJRH reports it has since been extended to Aspen Creek Elementary, Country Lane Intermediate, Country Lane Primary, Creekwood Elementary and Wolf Creek Elementary, with more sites expected to be added during the year. Fox23 described the pilot as running at five elementary schools, so the headline count depends on whether the original trial site is counted alongside the expansion.
What the cards actually do
It is worth being precise about the technology, because “tracking” is doing a lot of work in the coverage. The card does not track a child. It holds an identifier that is read at one fixed point, the reader mounted by the bus door, and that read is time-stamped and tied to the vehicle’s own GPS position. What the system produces is a ridership record, a series of boarding and alighting events, rather than continuous location data on the student. Everything a parent sees after that is those events plus the bus’s position on the route.
That distinction matters for privacy as much as for accuracy. A passive card has no battery, no GPS and no ability to report anything on its own. It is inert until it is presented to a reader, and off the bus it is a piece of plastic.
The frequency has not been disclosed
None of the outlets covering the pilot has stated which frequency band the cards use, and the district has not published a specification, so the honest answer is that it is not on the record. As general industry context rather than confirmed fact, a credential presented deliberately to a reader beside the bus door is the textbook case for a 13.56 MHz HF or NFC card, which reads at a few centimetres and is difficult to trigger by accident from the seat behind. Passive UHF, or RAIN RFID, reads at metres rather than centimetres, which is an asset in a warehouse and a liability at a bus door where the system needs to know which single card was presented and by whom. School Bus Fleet reported in 2012 that the Versatrans student tracking product used a 13.56 MHz solution with HID iCLASS readers and clamshell cards, though that is a decade-old datapoint and no guarantee of what is fitted in Broken Arrow now.
What it costs
Christina Dixon, the district’s director of communications, told KJRH that RFID card reader kits cost approximately $215 per bus, while the tablets and accompanying kits come to roughly $1,600 per bus. Those figures exclude installation, cellular service and the student cards themselves. The purchase was funded through the district’s 2015 and 2023 bond issues. Broken Arrow has not disclosed how many pupils are enrolled in the pilot, nor the total value of the contract.
The split is telling. The reader is the cheap part of a ridership deployment, and it usually is. The cost sits in the mobile data terminal, the connectivity and the labour to fit it, which is why districts tend to phase these rollouts bus by bus rather than switching a whole fleet on at once.
The app, and the human factor
The reads surface in My Ride K-12, the Tyler Technologies parent app the district uses for bus tracking, available free on Google Play and the App Store. Speaking to News on 6 when the app was introduced in August 2025, transportation manager Tammie White set out what the GPS side gives families: “They can go to their app and look and it shows the bus got to the bus stop at a specific time. Then the parent can start from that time forward looking for their child.”
Megan Smith, a parent whose children ride the bus, told KJRH the combination has changed her mornings. “I’m a single mom, so the system is kind of a lifesaver for me. They get themselves on the bus every morning,” she said. “So, it’s nice to be able to see when they get on the bus and the route that they take to school and exactly when they’re dropped off at school so that I don’t have to worry about how they’ve got here.”
The snags reported so far are behavioural rather than technical. Akehurst said the main difficulty has been parents reading the app too soon. “The parents learning how to read the app because sometimes they’re looking at the card reader app too early before the bus has even come and picked up their child,” he told the station. That is a familiar pattern in ridership deployments. The record is only as current as the last scan, so a blank screen before the bus has reached the stop reads like a fault when it is simply an absence of events.
The pupils appear unbothered. “It’s just fun to scan,” student Quinton Smith told KJRH.
Superintendent Chuck Perry told Fox23 the point of the exercise is reassurance when weather or traffic delays a route. “We want to keep those students as safe as we can,” he said. The district has said a wider rollout is possible if the pilot holds up, and more schools are due to join over the course of the year.
