Sometime next week, Cumberland Valley School District will hit the switch on a new on-board camera technology that will dramatically improve its ability to identify and fine drivers who illegally pass stopped school buses.

The district is installing video cameras on all 85 of its student school buses. The cameras are designed to identify, much like an EZ-Pass camera on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, the make, model and license plate of any vehicle that passes a bus that’s stopped in the course of its route.

“Right now, our drivers are responsible for getting the license plate number and as much other information as they can,” said Susan Keller, district transportation manager.

“Very often, they are not able to get enough information for a violation to be pursued. … There is a lot of frustration because we know it (illegal passing) is occurring.”

It has long been illegal in every state to pass any school bus that has stopped and has red lights flashing and a stop sign extended.

Pennsylvania law requires all drivers who come upon a stopped school bus to stop 10 feet behind or in front of the bus. The only exception is for opposing traffic on a road where there is a median divider.

But illegal passing seems to happen a lot.

One annual survey conducted by the National Association of State Directors of Pupil Transportation Services showed that, on a single day last fall, 94,581 school bus drivers reported 62,482 vehicles passed their buses illegally.

When that number is extrapolated nationally, the group says, it’s quite possible that this violation occurs up to a mind-blowing 43.8 million times a year.

That’s a lot of unnecessary risk that school transportation officials, parents — and now, ambitious tech firms — hope to reduce.

One catastrophic local case occurred last year, when Arianna Landis, an 11th grader at Northeastern High School, was struck by a car and died while trying to board a school bus on York Haven Road in Newberry Township, York County.

The woman police say was driving the car, Marie C. McGahan, 25, was charged in June with homicide by vehicle, careless driving and illegal passing.

Cumberland Valley is part of a first wave of districts in Pennsylvania that are adding the bus cameras in the wake of a 2020 law that opened the door to enforcement of the no-passing statute by automated camera systems.

Its vendor is Lorton, Va.-based BusPatrol, which bills itself as the only firm dedicated exclusively to school bus safety systems. Spokeswoman Kate Spree said the firm has 32 client districts throughout Pennsylvania, most in the Philadelphia and Lehigh Valley areas.

In central Pennsylvania, Spring Grove, Central Dauphin and, now, Cumberland Valley school districts have hopped on board.

The cameras, mounted at various spots on the exterior of the bus, activate automatically when the mechanical stop sign side arms go out, capturing a 360-degree view of the traffic outside the bus.

If a violation is flagged, BusPatrol has an artificial intelligence platform that picks out the offending vehicle.

In Cumberland Valley, all suspected violations are flagged for review by members of the school district’s police force, which is empowered to handle these civil fines. Officers filter out any mistakes — for example, if a passing vehicle was actually on the other side of a median barrier.

Owners of the offending vehicle are notified of the violation within 30 days, and assessed a $300 civil fine. The enforcement notice, Spree says, contains a link to the captured video footage.

If the vehicle owner wishes to contest the ticket — one common defense is that the owner of the car was not the driver — they have the right to do that before a magisterial district judge, just like other traffic tickets. The court may require some kind of evidence, however, that the owner was not driving.

The cameras are causing citations to mushroom.

A 2018 legislative analysis of the issue noted that Pennsylvania police officers had written 2,198 citations for illegal school bus passes that year, with just 690 resulting in convictions.

But BusPatrol said in Pennsylvania its cameras have captured footage resulting in more than 29,000 citations for illegal passings since August 2022.

Nationally, less than 3 percent of its notices are contested, the company said.

That figure could not be independently confirmed by PennLive but, anecdotally, staff at a district judge’s office serving portions of the Central Dauphin School District said it has not seen any appeals there since CD implemented its camera program last December.

Violations do not cause points to be assessed on a driver’s record, and according to the statute, may not be used by insurers to assess insurance premiums.

Under the law, the lion’s share of the fine, $250, goes to the school district. However, in Cumberland Valley, Keller says most of that money will be sent directly to BusPatrol as its payment for the technology and operations.

“This is a way for us to do it without having to pay for it out of taxpayer funds,” Keller said. “I don’t want people to think this is a money-making operation, because it’s not. It’s a way for us to keep the kids safe.”

Not everybody is on board with these new on-board cameras.

A grassroots group of motorists that has been fighting automated speed enforcement generally sees the advent of the new camera system as the government and private sector collaborating to extract fees from what they see as an overhyped problem.

In testimony before the state Senate Transportation Committee last month, Jay Beeber of the National Motorists Association noted most student injuries or deaths in school bus accidents come either from accidents while kids are on the bus or because they’ve been hit by the school bus itself.

Beeber said that’s where policy-makers focus should be. He argued there are better and fairer ways to address illegal passing, such as public education campaigns, consolidating bus stop locations or requiring drivers to escort children in 8th grade or younger across the street, as is done in California.

But local transportation managers say the law’s been around forever, and they believe that the new cameras will give it needed teeth.

At Spring Grove, where the cameras are in their second year of use, Transportation Coordinator Lori Stine said the local review is taken seriously.

Between February and April, Stine noted, Spring Grove’s school resource officer declined a little more than 20 percent of 134 flagged violations, for reasons ranging from the stop arm not being fully deployed before the pass to the driver not having a fair chance to stop because of site conditions.

As often as these illegal bus passes happen, accidents seem to be relatively rare.

The PennDOT reviewed its data on pedestrian accidents involving school buses for PennLive for this report and found 66 separate incidents from 2018 through 2022, with a total of 66 injuries and two deaths, including one adult.

It was not immediately clear if all of these accidents involved illegal passes, however.

The national pupil transportation association, meanwhile, recorded 51 student fatalities from illegal passes between 2000 through 2020.

That’s the risk transportation managers are trying to eliminate.

“I’ve seen cars travel on the right-hand side (of a stopped bus), and on the grass … It’s always in the back of our head. We don’t want that to happen,” Keller said. “If we prevent one bad accident, then you know, it’s worth it.”

According to The Morning Call of Allentown, it was one Allentown mom’s close call that served as the impetus for the legislation that cleared the way for legislative authorization of the so-called “side stop signal arm enforcement systems” in Pennsylvania.

Amber Clark began advocating for cameras on school buses in 2018 after her daughter Olivia Clark-Ortiz was nearly hit by a car while trying to get on the school bus on her third day of kindergarten.

The technology is being retro-fitted onto most buses.

But Gerry Wosewick, executive director of the Pennsylvania School Bus Association, which represents private contractors who provide transportation service for the schools, said it is starting to become a standard feature on new buses, which means the implementation of these cameras will become far more widespread in five to 10 years.

With 85 buses making nearly 400 runs per day, Keller noted, “that’s 400 opportunities per day to keep our kids safe.”