Mayor John Vieau talks about Chicopee’s partnership with BusPatrol and its commitment to student pedestrian safety.
Reminder Publishing photos by Tyler Garnet
CHICOPEE — As part of National Bus Safety Week, Chicopee and BusPatrol hosted a press conference on Oct. 23 to discuss their partnership, their mission to enforce student pedestrian safety and their new PSA campaign, “Safety is Shared.”
According to the joint initiative, the campaign highlights the people, partnerships and everyday actions that contribute to safer school bus journeys through educational content and community engagement.
Chicopee launched Massachusetts’ first citywide automated school bus stop-arm safety program, powered by BusPatrol, to detect and enforce illegal passings of stopped school buses.
“Our partnership with BusPatrol is real, it’s implemented and we are keeping our students safe,” Mayor John Vieau said. “When a student gets on a bus, we want to make sure that they get home safely at the end of the day after a full day of school.”
So far, the safety program has equipped 10 school buses with automated stop-arm camera technology. Vieau said 119 buses in total will soon have the technology.
BusPatrol President and Chief Innovation Officer Justin Meyers described the company as the nation’s largest provider of child safety systems on school buses, with a mission to protect kids on their commute to and from school.
Myers referred to a 2026 study by the National Association of State Directors of Pupil Transportation Services, which found that in 39 states and the District of Columbia, about 26.2% of school bus drivers participated in a one-day survey to report motorists who passed their stopped school buses.
In the survey, 101,334 school bus drivers reported that 56,024 vehicles passed their buses illegally on a single day during the 2025-2026 school year. Adjusting for 100% of the school bus drivers in the U.S., we would have seen just over 213,800 illegal passings each day.
Meyers said it shows drivers illegally pass a bus with its stop-arm down about 39-45 million times a year.
Since the program started at the beginning of the school year in Chicopee on Aug. 26, Chicopee Police Public Information Officer Travis Odiorne said 186 citations have been sent out.
A recent survey from the Governors Highway Safety Association highlights that nearly one in two children in the United States have experienced a close call near a school bus, underscoring the risks students can face during their daily commutes.
Meyers talked about how cars illegally passing a school bus can impact a student, from near misses to serious injuries. He told a story of a student waiting for her school bus on the grass of her bus stop when a car sped behind the bus, drove on the right-hand side of the bus, spun out of control and struck the student into the air.
“Luckily, Abigail survived, and she did not have any serious injuries, but if you can imagine for the poor little 10-year-old girl who then goes to school the next day, she’s not thinking about her math class, she’s not thinking about getting on to the school bus and hanging out with her friends, she’s thinking about the time and associating going to school with a time that she thought that she might die. That happens all across this country every single day in the United States,” Meyers said.
He emphasized the importance of National Bus Safety Week and said BusPatrol is also asking every driver to make a simple commitment that when a school bus stops and its red lights flash, obey the law and stop.
Meyers gave a tour of a Chicopee school bus equipped with the safety technology. He explained that the entire system is hooked into the bus’s telematics, so it knows when it is stopped and triggers the cameras on each side of the bus. Once that happens, the bus uses a proprietary AI system called AVA to monitor the cameras.
Meyers said AVA does one thing only: identify any vehicles illegally passing a school bus. If AVA captures a potential violation, it cuts a 30-second evidence package from each camera and sends it to BusPatrol for review and verification by two separate humans.
The technology never captures people’s faces. When a vehicle illegally passes a stopped bus, cameras on the front, side, and back of the bus capture the plate and vehicle, and only the person whose name is registered to the vehicle receives the citation.
If BusPatrol determines a violation occurred, it sends the evidence package to local law enforcement, which has sole discretion over whether to issue a citation. Once the ticket is dismissed or settled, the data is deleted.
When the ticket is sent to the violator’s house, it also includes a link that lets the driver see what they did wrong.
Vieau also explained how taxpayers pay nothing; violators do. Under Massachusetts law, anyone who passes a school bus illegally gets a $250 fine for a first offense, and a $500 fine for a second. Odiorne said they’ve had only first-time offenders so far.
