Traditional-calendar school students will be in class first thing Tuesday morning. But months before they hopped on the school bus, Durham Public School administrators were analyzing how those bus drivers could save time and eventually taxpayer money.

"We're making stops at community locations for students where there are a high number of students who are there," said Scott Denton, executive director of transportation services for Durham Public Schools. "There's safety in numbers."

To see if your child's bus stop will change Tuesday, click here.

Denton and his staff worked to cut down on the 10,000 bus stops drivers made each day last year. Altogether, each school bus here drives about 15,000 miles each year and administrators are hoping that technology can help save time.

"GPS has been out two, three or four years in school buses, but it's not really been refined to a point where we felt like we could really use it," Denton said.

That changes this year. For the first time, the transportation team is using GPS technology to map out the most efficient route and also see where each bus stops.

"Let's say if the parent had a question about whether the bus came this morning or not," he said as he watched an information icon pop up on his computer screen. "The bus did stop at 6:36 in the morning and it stayed stopped for 31 seconds."

The system will also use technology called Connect Ed.

"We figured out how to use that technology to be able to call by bus number so when a single bus is going to be late, we can send a note out to those parents and notify them the bus is off-schedule," Denton said.

"When we know a bus is going to be off-schedule by an extreme amount of time ... 15 to 30 minutes off schedule ... we will have the capability to send a message to parents to let them know the bus is going to be late."

Changes will come in the shop, too, where technicians retrofitted about 100 school buses this summer through a grant. Denton said those new components will reduce the amount of emissions going into the environment.

"We're also partnering with the Department of Public Instruction [to get] a hybrid bus," Denton said. "We're going to retrofit one of our diesel buses with electric technology that will make it a diesel-electric hybrid."