“We want to help managers analyze the
way they’re running their business,” said Martin, who pointed to an American As- sociation of School Administrators survey showing that 18 percent of superinten- dents cut transportation funding in the 2007-2008 school year — a figure that rose to 30 percent two years later. “Superintendents and school boards
need as much information as possible when they are making policy decisions about school bus operations,” Martin said. “If we want to say we are effective and ef- ficient as school transportation service providers, we have to be able to justify that for various reasons.” Lawrence, the director of transporta-
tion at Fairport (N.Y.) Central School District, is team leader of the Research group, which is investigating how KPIs work to streamline operations in student transportation, transit and other areas of the public sector. “Establishing these KPIs is very important to our industry because ac-
countability has become tighter and tighter, so people need to justify what they’re doing,” Lawrence said. He noted that some organizations have
already created KPIs for school transpor- tation, including the North Carolina and Florida Departments of Education and the Metropolitan Area Transportation Efficiency Study (MATES) in Colorado. In the mid-1980s, two longtime transporta- tion directors, Augie Campbell and the late Joe Mirabella, founded MATES, which collects and compares data from roughly 20 school districts statewide. “One of the goals here is to make sure
you’re comparing apples to apples,” Mar- tin said, adding that the Research group will narrow down a “massive” list of KPIs to the most relevant dozen or so.
..Common benchmarks used by MATES
include the number of students enrolled, the number receiving school-bus service, cost per student and transportation staffing ratios. Martin emphasized that the job of the Feedback group could be the most criti-
cal because the end product must be user friendly. Tis group will ask 50 volunteers for their opinion on the data-collection system. “We want this to be something that
won’t overwhelm people but will enable them to ask questions and get answers,” said Martin. John Fahey, a consultant with Tyler
Technologies, is leading the Technology group, which is designing the “dashboard” or backbone where transportation direc- tors will log information. “Users will need to go online to enter
their data. We will have clear instructions because it’s critical that they enter the right data to avoid the ‘garbage-in, gar- bage-out’ syndrome,” Fahey said. As assistant superintendent of Buffalo
(N.Y.) Public Schools, Fahey oversaw the transportation program for 18 years and relied on KPIs when the board of educa- tion proposed new ideas. “We need this tool to lift the level of
our industry to a more professional, data- driven level,” he said. ■
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