All 58 buses will get cameras

The Vermilion Parish School Board decided to put a camera on every school bus instead of 30 like previously decided at committee meeting earlier last week.

Kirk Soileau, head of the transportation department for the school board, made a proposal about purchasing 58 cameras at a cost of around $58,000 at last week’s committee meeting.

The committee, had committed to purchase 30 cameras instead of 58. The School Board was expected to vote on the purchase of the 30 cameras at Thursday’s meeting. It would have left 18 buses with no cameras but eventually they would have gotten them over a four year period.

But before the vote took place, school board member Bill Searle made a motion for the School Board to purchase the 58 cameras, putting a camera in every bus, except special education buses.

“It will be a hard decision to decide which buses get the 30 cameras,” Searle said. “What happens if we put 30 cameras on some buses and something happens to someone where there is no camera? How do we explain to the public that we have certain buses with cameras and others that don’t.”

Searle said the money is there, so every bus should have a camera.

Thus far, only nine buses have cameras and 10 more are on order. By next month those 10 cameras will be installed in buses giving the school board 19 outfitted buses.

The 58 cameras will be installed by the transportation department over the summer. By the start of the next school year, the cameras will be installed.

Soileau explained to the school board members during a committee meeting why cameras are important.

“We have had a lot of issues come up where a camera could have solved the problem,” Soileau said. “Children will say they did not do it or ‘it was not me’. The principal pulls the hard drive and all of a sudden there it is on the camera. The camera doesn’t lie. It shows what happened.”

He said on the nine buses that have cameras, it has solved many problems for principals.

The camera is placed on the ceiling in the front of the bus.

There was talk that if a camera is placed on a school bus, that possibly a monitor (an extra person hired by the School Board to watch the children during the drive to and from school) would no longer be needed on busses.

School Board Member Charles Campbell did not like the idea of getting rid of a monitor because of a camera.

“A monitor can stop a fight but a camera can’t,” Campbell said. “The monitors now are keeping the kids quiet on the bus. A camera can not keep the kids quiet.”