The Hernando County School Board has a contract for GPS monitoring of the buses with a company called Synovia Solutions GPS. In the summer, the School board voted to remove all the GPS equipment from the buses and return it to Synovia.
Synovia is claiming that the issues with the software was caused by the School District’s implementation of the software. The fault of each party would have to be hashed out in the litigation if it came to that.
Synovia offered to renegotiate the contract. There was a discussion to see if litigation could be avoided. Synovia said that they could provide an additional app that can be used by parents to see when the bus is going to arrive via GPS tracking. The new contract would start on or around January 1, 2017 and cost $214,500 for 5 years. Although the contract could be ended after five years.
Beth Narverud asked, “how much they get from the state to transport students.” Mark Johnson said he seemed to remember “something like 4 million from the state (for transportation) and ran at around a deficit of 3 million for the transportation budget. In round numbers.
That’s give or take. That is 3 million dollar deficit that we had to take from the general fund to pay for transportation. Those numbers are just a ballpark, that I somehow remember.”
The board was polled to see if they were still leaning towards ending the Synovia contract and a majority of the board said they were still in favor of ending the contract.
Lori Romano asked for clarification about reinstalling the GPSs on the buses. The district staff did as instructed and removed the units and had them prepared to be shipped. Synovia requested to be able to reinstall the devices on 150 buses to see if they could make good on the contract for an additional $16,500. The legal staff felt this was a good faith effort to try to save the contract and avoid litigation. The re-installation was apparently done without the direct approval of the School Board.
At the workshop on December 13th, school board members Guadagnino, Johnson and Duval felt that the contract should be terminated again. School board member Prescott felt that the company should be given another chance.
Related Article:
Tech on the School Bus: Synovia Contract Update