munication with families and helped manage the large number of field trips and extracurricular transportation requests her department handles throughout the year. Additionally, she said, Wayfinder gives her drivers access to route information and turn-by-turn navigation while also supporting an RFID student card program. “With students scanning on and off the bus, we have better visibility into ridership and another tool to support student safety,” she added. Mapengo noted that the biggest benefit is having tech-
nology that connects so many pieces of our operation. “It gives our staff better information, provides families with greater visibility and helps us make more data-driven decisions. Ultimately, these tools allow us to operate more efficiently while continuing to focus on what matters most: Safely transporting our students every day,” she said. Because transportation changes minute by minute, being able to quickly pull up GPS, look at video, check ridership information, or see what is happening with a route makes a huge difference, she said. “Years ago, so much of transportation was, ‘Let me call
the driver and find out,’” she recalled. “Now we have tools that can help us answer questions much faster and with better information. It has also helped with accountability
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and safety. We can look at trends, identify areas where we need additional training and use actual information to coach our employees instead of making assumptions. Technology doesn’t do the job for our team. It just gives them better tools to do the job well.” She said she is proud of her team’s willingness to grow and change, especially because technology can be uncom- fortable. “We have employees who love technology and others who would probably be perfectly happy if I never introduced another new device or program,” she admitted. “But that is part of leading through change. You have to explain the why, give people time to learn it, listen when something isn’t working, and celebrate when they get it.” She said that she lives by the same mantra everyday:
Technology should support people, not replace them. “We can put GPS, cameras, tablets, scanners, routing sys- tems, and every new piece of technology on a school bus, but none of those things greet a child in the morning,” she said. “They don’t notice when a student is having a bad day. They don’t build relationships with families, and they don’t make the thousands of decisions our employees make every day to keep kids safe. Our people do that. “Technology simply gives our team better tools to do what they already do incredibly well: Safely take care of our students.” ●
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WWW.WASH-BOTS.COM 70 School Transportation News • SEPTEMBER 2026
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