The department ended up cutting more than 100 bus routes, impacting more than 2,000 students at 51 schools statewide.

“I feel that we lost the confidence of parents, said L’Heureux.

“All we did was pick up, and take the ball and run,” said David Oasay, who is the director of operations for Iosepa Transportation.

“We've got air conditioning, seat belts, overhead racks, high-back seats, and we can show exactly what happened at that time with cameras on the bus,” he told reporter Lara Yamada on one of the company’s buses at a small bus yard in Kona on the Big Island.

Iosepa Transportation, with its small fleet of well-equipped and technologically prepared buses, provided L'Heureux with the platform for a different strategy: find out what’s happening with every bus, on every route, at any point in time.

Vice Principal Vogt had no idea what was about to fall on his watch.

“It kind of caught me off guard. What? Z-Pass?” he said.

On Jan. 3rd, the Department of Education launched a pilot program to install GPS tracking software on all of Iosepa's buses and issue Z-Pass coded cards to each student riding those buses.

“We can track the path of each of the buses, where they pick up their kids, the times, the speed, idle time,” said Oasay.

“You can see exactly where they are right now,” began Zonar Regional Account Manager Kyle Bruny showing KITV Zonar’s tracking system on a laptop computer sitting in the back of his car.