LANSING, Mich. — School busses in Michigan need to go through a yearly inspection by the Michigan State Police (MSP) and that inspection data is now available to the public through QR codes on bus service doors.
The School Bus Inspection Program has been around for years—working to insure that Michigan's thousands of school busses are operating safely—but it wasn't until recently that this information has been available to parents via a QR code.
"So the QR codes, there's one on the door of every single bus. Anybody can scan them with a smartphone, and what you're going to get once you scan them, you're going to get the year that it was inspected, the tag that it got, whether it passed or didn't pass, and then you're going to get what school it belongs to," said Motor Carrier Sgt. Jeremy Mater of MSP.
When a school bus is inspected, it receives one of three grades:
- Pass - This indicates that the bus is in satisfactory condition
- Yellow - This indicates that the bus is safe for operation, but need maintenance. A bus receiving this grade must also be repaired within 60 days of the inspection.
- Red - This indicates that the bus is in an unsafe condition and must be repaired before being put back into service.
"Every single year, every single bus has to be inspected by one of our 12 inspectors across the state, and once they're there, and they plug in the QR number into our system, and then once it's inspected, it's going to go live, once they enter it into the system on what the tag is," said Sgt. Mater.
The annual year-end bus inspection reports are also available online. During the 2022-23 school year, the report found 12,270 vehicles passed the inspection, 1,119 required maintenance and 2,689 vehicles needed repairs before returning to the fleet.
Michigan operates nearly 17,000 vehicles to transport over 800,000 children every year. The fleet of vehicles drives over 10 million miles annually.
