Canyons School District reduces incidents by 50% with proactive coaching and training

A safety program founded on proactive coaching protects and empowers drivers.

Every school day, over 190 school buses transport more than 15,000 students across the schools of Salt Lake County. With such a high ridership, safety is paramount for Canyons School District. To protect their drivers and students, each school bus is equipped with an extensive system of interior bus cameras, altogether contributing to 16 camera views. Due to the large volume of footage, finding specific video of key events was time-consuming and inefficient prior to Samsara—making it difficult to coach drivers and exonerate them from false claims.

By adopting Samsara dual-facing AI Dash Cams across their school bus fleet, Canyons has taken their safety program to the next level. With real-time visibility into events occurring inside the bus, supervisors can now proactively coach their drivers on mobile usage using in-cab alerts. In addition, Canyons is also leveraging video footage as a teaching opportunity, surfacing examples of positive behaviors to demonstrate safe driving. With Samsara’s Video-Based Safety solution, Canyons reduced mobile usage and implemented a metrics-driven training approach, resulting in nearly a 50% decrease in overall incidents.

“We can see the driver and the incident clearly. You can’t deny what you see on the video,” said Jeremy Wardle, Director of Transportation. “Now we can do more data-driven training with our drivers and teach them how to be more aware of what’s around them.”

Samsara’s ease-of-use drives improved efficiency and massive savings.

Before Samsara, it was difficult for Canyons to provide drivers with feedback since they lacked real-time visibility. If they wanted to pull footage from their third-party camera system, the school bus needed to either be within WiFi range, or an employee would need to manually download the contents directly to a flash drive. This caused review for safety events to be time-consuming and inefficient.

By leveraging Samsara’s on-demand video retrieval, Canyons has unlocked tremendous savings in time and cost. Since Samsara footage is automatically uploaded to the cloud, Canyon’s transportation management team is able to locate key footage in under five minutes, instead of the usual 48 hour turnaround. This has improved back-office efficiency by an estimated 75%, while also resulting in a signifiant reduction in insurance payouts. 

When one of Canyon’s school buses was involved in an incident, they quickly and easily retrieved footage captured on the AI Dash Cam to prove that a tow truck had failed to yield to a red light. By exonerating their driver from false blame, they saved an estimated $100,000 in insurance payouts. “Incidents happen so fast, and it’s hard to remember the facts,” says Wardle. “Samsara makes it so easy to pull video footage, and that helps us protect the district and our drivers.”

Real-time visibility into school bus location improves back-office efficiency.

Before Samsara, though Canyons employed a legacy GPS provider that offered some visibility into the location of their school buses, they faced challenges with latency and product failure. They saw long lag times between 15 minutes to two hours with their previous GPS navigation. Issues with reliability worsened as they contended with hardware damage due to Utah’s extreme temperatures. After over 10 years with their legacy GPS provider, Canyons sought a modern solution that could take their school bus operations to the next level. 

With an intentional change management strategy in mind, Canyons equipped their entire fleet of over 190 school buses with Samsara in a single week. “We installed Samsara in record time,”  says Wardle. “We started getting data on our school buses right away, and we saw the benefit of it from day one.” 

Real-time visibility transformed Canyon’s GPS tracking capabilities, enabling them to pinpoint the precise location of their school buses. Whether it’s returning a bus to the yard for inventory, or orienting a substitute driver navigating an unfamiliar neighborhood, administrators can now see where all of their school buses are on the Samsara Dashboard. As a result, Canyons is able to streamline dispatch and minimize bus delays, saving several man hours per week.

“Once we got Samsara, we didn’t need to hope that our buses were on their route,” said Wardle. “We knew where our buses were at all times, and that has made a night and day difference.” 

Real-time visibility has also enabled Canyons to lead with transparency when managing parent communication. When parents call asking about a school bus’s location, the dispatch team can now respond to these inquiries with accurate ETAs. “We get a lot of calls from parents, saying ‘a bus moved past our stop’ or ‘where’s my bus?’” says Wardle. “Now, we can give parents information about where a bus may have missed a turn, and also tell drivers how to get back on their route.”

Protecting and celebrating drivers improves retention amidst a challenging labor market.

Prior to Samsara, it was a challenge for Canyons to build a comprehensive safety program since it was difficult to coach and celebrate drivers on their performance. Facing a driver shortage across the school transportation industry, Canyons needed a better way to protect and retain their drivers. 

Since implementing Samsara, Canyons has fostered a culture of safety that motivates and rewards their drivers. By encouraging positive driving habits and friendly competition with Samara Safety Scores, they’ve been able to reduce risky behavior and improve driver engagement. “We’re using Safety Scores to coach drivers and create a little competition for them to get better scores,” said Wardle. “This is huge for motivating and rewarding people.”

By developing a safety culture founded on protecting and celebrating their drivers, Canyons is able to improve retention and stay resilient during a tough labor market. “Samsara helped us retain and hire enough people to stay afloat, even as the economy was shifting,” says Wardle.