Case Study: Houston Independent School District achieves district-wide precision bus tracking in 30 days with Zonar Systems

HISD puts precision bus tracking in parents’ hands, in 30 days

The Houston Independent School District (HISD) is the largest public school system in Texas, serving more than 200,000 students across nearly 300 schools with almost 1,000 buses that travel some 87,000 miles daily to transport roughly 36,000 students. Faced with chronic bus driver shortages and frequent last‑minute route changes, parents were often left uninformed and schools were overwhelmed with calls; the district’s previous telematics solution required manual bus‑to‑route linking, which was impractical at HISD’s scale.

HISD replaced its provider with Zonar, leveraging existing V4 TCUs and rolling out Zonar MyView (with a Bytecurve dispatcher portal) from pilot to full district implementation in under a month. Parents now receive real‑time bus locations and alerts, administrators report far fewer parent calls and greater transparency, staff were trained quickly, and Zonar’s dedicated U.S. 24/7 support helped HISD be 100% live by the start of school.

Houston Independent School District

Olivia Salazar

Compliance Representative