Does your kid ride the school bus in Wake County? Now there are color-coded IDs.

A new accessory on the book bags of Wake County elementary school students could reduce the chances of children getting on the wrong school bus or being dropped off at the wrong bus stop.

The new school year started Monday for Wake’s 43,000 multitrack year-round students with elementary schools placing color-coded tags on the book bags of bus riders. The new tags include information such as the student’s name and school, bus route name, bus stop, and school and family telephone numbers.

The tags are colored red for students in pre-K, kindergarten and first grade and yellow for students in second through fifth grades. Drivers will know not to let students with red-colored tags get off the bus if there’s no adult to pick them up.

“You get to have a red tag because this lets the bus driver know – and any of the other adults that may be with you on the bus or around the bus – that you have to have a mommy or daddy at the bus stop to help you out,” Jessica Burroughs, principal of Banks Road Elementary School near Fuquay-Varina, told kindergarten student Isabella Vouga, 5, on Monday.

Tags will be placed on the backpacks of students at Wake’s modified-calendar and track 4 year-round elementary schools when they return to class later this month and at traditional-calendar schools in August.

More than 75,000 Wake students ride the bus each school year, many of them elementary-school age. There have been some incidents of elementary students getting on the wrong bus or off at the wrong stop.

The tags could be especially needed this year as school officials are warning that bus routes may have changed since the end of last school year. Families can look up bus information at wcpss.net/transportation.

Wake has annually revised bus routes over the last several years due to difficulties finding enough drivers.

Once schools place the tags on book bags, students should keep them attached. Bus drivers will look to see that students have tags when boarding the bus in the morning. In the afternoon, bus riders will be required to have a tag in order to board the bus.

At the start of the school year, some students may use a temporary bus pass while they are being assigned school transportation.

Some Wake elementary schools were already putting ID tags on book bags before this school year, especially for younger students. But North Carolina’s largest school district is standardizing the practice now for all students at its elementary schools.

“I think the tagging system is just another layer of ensuring that our students are safely riding transportation to and from school every day,” said Burroughs, the principal.

This story was originally published July 10, 2017 at 4:29 PM with the headline "Does your kid ride the school bus in Wake County? Now there are color-coded IDs.."