An Industry Shift
Crystal Schmidt, an administrative assistant for Helena Public Schools, demonstrates the bus location using the district’s management software.
to see in real time the location of their children’s buses, which seems to be all the rage. “If you don’t walk them to water, they don’t know how well it works,” he
added. Ever since, and despite COVID-19, Helena Public Schools has realized
near-100 percent usage. Ensuring the technology is reliable has been important, but even more vital has been the community outreach and edu- cation about the app’s benefits. When parents actually downloaded the app, lo and behold they started using it. “We have 99 percent of our parents [2,263 registered users] download the
app. Now, do 99 percent use it every single day to its fullest advantage? Prob- ably not. But I will tell you we have an exceptionally high rate,” Cohn shared. Last summer, parents for the first time had to download the Parent Portal
app from Edulog as a prerequisite for signing up their children for school bus service. And for those 10 families that have “dumb” phones, they still needed to come into the office and complete the required forms, Cohn added. Meanwhile, Cedar Rapids Community Schools in Iowa is in its second year
of using the Stopfinder app from Transfinder. Scott Wing, the district’s trans- portation manager, echoed Cohn that parents need to know the technology exists and then they need to download it to their devices. “We’ve taken a multiple approach at informing parents that the product
even exists,” he noted. “The schools are the point of contact with families, so we’ve really been educating the schools. ‘Hey, encourage the use of Stop- finder. Here are some brochures, here is some material that you can hand out when they are signing up for the bus. Make sure they are downloading the app and are getting that enabled.’ We’ve sent out emails throughout our student information systems and encouraged people to sign up that way.” It’s still a work in progress for Wing and his team, as 31.5 percent of stu- dents and families were using Stopfinder as of this report. Complicating
Kerry Somerville, a business development executive and geograph- ic information systems specialist with Safe Fleet, observed that more and more requests for pro- posals have come in from school districts over the past year that call for student tracking apps. “There is no longer a focus on routing, but it’s a nec- essary piece of that,” he commented. “But people are more concerned with where the buses and the students are. Parents are demanding this.” He added that a focus
of Safe Fleet is to know what school districts this is and is not acceptable when it comes to tracking. Some want it all—real-time bus location, arrival time, where and when students got on and off the bus, alerts—and others want to pick and choose a la carte. He also noted the im- portance of having clean routing and student data to avoid broadcasting bad information. “And that takes a lot of
work. Many operations are not prepared for that,” he added.
—R.G.
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