DALLAS -- Imagine a school bus that ‘knows’ which kids it’s carrying and exactly when and where each got on. It’s not science fiction. It’s a new hi-tech tool DISD will start using this summer – to monitor students who need a little extra help.

Students like 13-year-old Amber Ramos. She’s a special education teenager in a wheelchair who requires a lift to get on the bus at Stockard Middle School in Oak Cliff. “She’s doing great,” says school bus driver George Douglas. But soon, Amber will have another safety net to ensure she gets where she’s going.

A tiny “beep” indicates the ID card on a lanyard around Amber’s neck has signaled her bus that she’s on board.

“We can actually tell a parent we were at that stop at 7:40 a.m.,” says Leatha Mullens, chief technology officer for Dallas County Schools, “and that stop took us about four minutes.” Mullens scrolls a mouse over an elaborate Google map on a computer monitor in her office. She supervised a trial run of the program last year. Now, Dallas ISD has given the green light to expand the system for all its special ed students and buses this summer.

The technology is RFID, or Radio Frequency Identification. Each of about 200 buses has been equipped with an RFID reader near the wheel-chair lift. “So as they go through the portal,” says transportation director Tim Jones, “this antennae will read the card.” He points to a black plastic pad mounted vertically near the door.

Each special education student will be given a new school ID card that has an imbedded RFID tag. The reader emits a signal and the card reflects a response. Every time a card is read on a bus, a marker shows up on a website in real time, tracking every student, every step of the trip.

“We get reads from all vehicles every ten seconds,” says Mullens.

The system has been combined with GPS technology that tracks each bus around the city. Together, the two systems cost about $1.3 million over the past four years, or about $1600 per bus.

Amber’s mother Angelica greets her daughter at a nearby school where she works as a substitute. She wishes the system had been in place a month ago. “There was an accident on the freeway, and she was about an hour late,” says Angelica. “I had to call the district’s transportation department to find out where she was.”

Now, this mom knows that Amber will have a second set of eyes, or radio waves, following her daughter’s every move.

E-mail jbrady@wfaa.com