Advice to Directors
Gaurav Sharda advises anyone who is starting on a technology journey to focus on the outcomes they want to achieve rather than the shiny, new technology avail- able. “It’s a little bit less about technology,” he said. “It’s more about the problems we are trying to find a solution for.” He said school districts need to
focus their journey on a piece of technology that would be the most relevant to the issues they are experiencing. “You might have a very noisy
family base who is seeking a self-service tool, where they want to see all [the information] like in a family app. They want to see the buses coming in, going out, visibility to where their child is at all points in time,” he said. Other challenges could be imple- menting electric school buses or wanting to consolidate routes and make them more efficient. “Focus on what problems you’re trying to solve, and then think about your strategy to execute that,” he explained. “Do you have the resources to execute that in house? Have you outsourced that to contractors?” He recommended relying on partners. And for those districts that use contractors, make them part of the journey so problems can be jointly solved. “You don’t have to go and find the solutions by yourselves. Trust the partners which are there,” he advised. “Seek more information. … But you don’t have to do it alone, just focus on the right business problems to solve for and then trust the partners and scale it in small baby steps.”
Gaurav Sharda presents the first product version of Beacon Connect at the Beacon Leadership Summit in 2023.
its whereabouts. “There are a lot of opportunities when you look at all the different personas and how many things must come together.”
This, he said, was the starting point behind launch- ing Beacon Connect, a fully integrated communications platform designed for school transportation. It provides live and historical vehicle tracking, which gives families and school staff live visibility into bus locations. It also includes a family app, where parents can receive alerts. It includes digital routing requests from families, allows for request-based access to onboard video recordings, allows drivers to log issues while dispatchers receive live fleet updates, and provides two-way communication— legacy radios were replaced with Verizon push-to-talk digital devices—between dispatch, drivers and school staff. “To bring all these personas together in one place [is]
where we streamline the communications,” he said, add- ing that it will allow for more proactive communication if a bus is running late, and allow for customers to commu- nicate directly with dispatch. “You think about in this day and age when you can track a pizza from the point that goes into the oven all the way coming to your house.” Bus location can be viewed when the bus is approach- ing a stop or pickup zone, which allows parents to prepare their children. Casaccio added that despite Beacon Connect, Sharda
continues to attend customer meetings and meet with the commercial team. “He probably spends more time with our customers
60 School Transportation News • JULY 2025
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