Prosper Independent School District in Texas has 30,603 students in the district, 7,200 of which are transported via the school bus. To combat growth, the district has evolved to creating hub stops to make routes more effective and partnering with an alternative transportation company.
Canton City also has an after-school program, where buses arrive between 5:30 p.m. and 6:30 p.m. to take students home. Therefore, those drivers can’t be assigned trips. She said she currently only has 13 drivers that are avail- able to drive trips that don’t have a midday or afterschool run. “That is really what becomes a challenge for
us when we talk about the influx of numbers,” she added. Technology has been a big help. “The
software that I use, it has been a game chang- er,” she added, noting the district uses Tyler student transportation software and the Tyler Drive tablet. “When we talk about the growth and the size, it is so beneficial to have this technology that can communicate with parents and keep the phone lines open. “That
intendent of the Year award, is allowing parent choice of the schools their students attend and offering trans- portation. This, he said, has turned into adding more regional stops, if parents choose to have their children attend schools outside of their normal boundary. “That means their parents may have to drive to a
location not too far away from their [home] to get the kids to a bus stop,” he explained. “It’s helping us with our growth, and it’s helping us with parents having choice of where to go in our in our school system.” As such, he said transportation is an all-day event, es-
pecially with extracurricular opportunities presented to students throughout the day. The district runs routes for students taking classes at the local college and technical schools, among other offerings. “It’s not just the a.m. and p.m. routes,” he said. “There
are a lot of things happening in between.” Back in Canton, Ohio, Vasquez added that she has
found the challenge is getting everyone on board with what transportation faces. She, too, noted that Canton City offers transportation at various times of the day. She created a spreadsheet with every full-time school
bus driver noted, so she can better create routes not only for home to school but after school trips. She said
48 School Transportation News • MARCH 2025
way we can focus on the routing,” she said. Meanwhile, Hoover said Bentonville parents are also
offered a transportation app they can use to request rid- ership service for home-to-school or a special program. Routing coordinators can review and accept the request, then assign a bus driver and bus to the route. Parents can see what bus their student is assigned to and where and what time the stop is. “It’s been hugely successful with the growth we’ve had because parents can do so much from their phone or the app, whatever device they may be on, and they’re still getting communications,” Hoover said, adding the app eliminates 13,000 parents calling the transportation office trying to register their students. “It’s just such a huge efficiency.” He added the transportation department has represen-
tatives available during the schools open houses to help families use the app.
Everything’s Bigger in Texas Forney Independent School District located east of
Dallas, Texas transports 34 percent of the daily student enrollment of 18,000 students. Michelle Ramm, the district’s director of transportation, said student ridership
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