As parents, we trust the school district with our kids every single day. We expect our schools to keep our children safe, and that responsibility shouldn’t stop at the schoolhouse door or bus stop. But with Fresno Unified rolling out the new Zum bus tracking system, the district is handing over far too much personal information about our kids to an outside tech vendor — and most families don’t even realize what is being shared.

Under this system, Zum collects our kids’ full names, school sites, photos, exact bus stops, pickup and drop-off times, and our home addresses through parent accounts. Storing detailed, daily physical tracking profiles of vulnerable children in an external corporate cloud creates a massive, unnecessary target. If major technology corporations and federal agencies suffer frequent data breaches, why are we pretending a private vendor’s servers are impenetrable?

The Fine Print Raises Many Questions

If you read the fine print in Zum’s Terms of Use and Privacy Policy, the reality is even more alarming. Zum’s standard terms state users grant the company a perpetual license to data, and their policy reserves the right to de-identify and share data with third parties for business purposes. On top of that, Zum explicitly disclaims liability for hackers, security intrusions, and unauthorized access. Why is our district turning over our children’s daily movement data to an outside vendor that legally refuses to take responsibility if its systems are compromised?

I recently joined a conference call with Dr. Ben Drati and members of the district IT team to voice these concerns. To their credit, they were receptive and willing to listen to the privacy issues I raised, and we discussed reasonable, common-sense solutions the district could look into. But this issue is much bigger than one phone call. I’m speaking up because every parent in this district deserves the exact same protections and transparency.

Parents Should Have the Ability to Opt Out

Parents have been told there is no opt-out option because the app doesn’t support it. Why is the tail wagging the dog? Fresno Unified is the customer here. An outside vendor should never dictate terms to our school district or override parents’ privacy rights simply because their app isn’t configured for it.

The district can accomplish all of its operational goals — balancing bus loads, tracking route efficiency, and verifying when students board — without giving Zum our kids’ personal profiles. All Fresno Unified needs to do is issue scan cards tied to an anonymized student ID number. The bus scanner and driver would only see that “Student #12345” boarded at a stop. The actual file that matches that number to a child’s name, photo, and home address would remain strictly where it belongs: secured behind Fresno Unified’s internal firewalls. If a student misbehaves on the bus, the driver can note the ID number and refer it to the school administration to handle.

The School Board needs to step in right now and pause this rollout before it goes any further.

We need a clear opt-out policy for every family, a transition to anonymized student IDs, and an immediate safeguard for parents whose information has already been uploaded: any family that unknowingly provided their data to Zum must be given the clear option to rescind it and receive written confirmation that their records and files have been completely purged from Zum’s servers.

Upgrading district transportation should never come at the expense of our children’s privacy and physical security.

About the Author

Marcelino Valdez is a Fresno Unified parent.

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