As children are heading back to school, we'd like to emphasize the importance of keeping them safe! Beyond general school bus safety guidelines, it's important to have peace of mind while your child rides to and from school. 

For more than three decades, we have been working with school bus manufacturers to design technology and monitors which improves the safety of busses for children.

Traffic safety is a main concern for parents who have children riding a school bus, and rightly so. In recent years, more states have been putting school bus safety as a higher priority by implementing protective legislation. 

In 2019, a school bus safety law, Senate Bill 25, went into effect in Georgia which would help increase the safety of children once they exited a school bus. The law requires all traffic to stop on both sides of the street when a school bus has stopped at a bus stop on a street without a median. Florida recently implemented a very similar law this past January of 2021.

While these additional traffic safety laws are indeed improving the safety of children on an external level, we have taken it a step further, raising safety standards for parents and school districts to prioritize the internal safety of the school bus.

While school bus transportation is widely considered one of the safest forms of transportation for children, transporting 26 million children nationwide daily, there are various instances where a child was unknowingly left behind on a bus.  The team at Doran Manufacturing worked collaboratively with school bus manufacturers to create Sleeping Child Check® monitors that will help prevent situations where a sleeping child could be overlooked and inadvertently left on a bus at the end of a shift.  

We took a look at how we were positioned in the transportation industry with high quality and intelligent technology which helps avoid catastrophic tire failures. This helped us recognize an opportunity for us to step into an adjacent industry to share our expertise and prevent further avoidable accidents, but this time it would directly impact and benefit children and families across the country.

How Does Doran’s Sleeping Child Check Monitor® Work? 

As either a factory-fit or aftermarket item our technology is straightforward and easy to install and use which helps to cost effectively and reliably prevent child loss or injury.

At the end of their route, a bus driver will look towards the back of the bus to make sure no children are still on the bus.  Unbeknownst to the driver, a child may have fallen asleep and may not be visible from the front of the bus.

Once the driver turns off the ignition on the bus, the Doran Sleeping Child Check® monitor is activated and requires the bus driver to walk to the back of the bus to deactivate it.   If the driver fails to press the button, the horn will sound and the interior lights will flash when they try to exit the vehicle.  This serves as an audible and visual reminder to check the bus for children.  In addition, Doran has systems with built-in timers to comply with various state or local laws and now has monitors that connect to the J1939 network for integration into on-board displays.

Ultimately, forcing the driver to go to the back of the bus at the end of a trip, gives the driver an opportunity to observe every single seat and look for sleeping children. 

As kids go back to school for the 2021-2022 school year, we want to encourage parents, teachers, administrators, school bus contractors and districts to set their standards higher for the safety of their students. We are so proud that Doran has been able to assist in creating safer environments for children across the country and look forward to helping additional school districts and child care providers to increase their safety standards.

For more information on the Doran Sleeping Child Check® Monitor, a member of our team would be happy to assist you.