patch notified immediately. “We want to be proactive, not reactive,” he said, adding
that other buses may be traveling in that direction. “That first vehicle may have to react. But now what we want to do is be responsive by putting it out there so that we don’t have to worry about buses getting stopped and students getting missed.” Regardless of transporting general or special educa-
tion students, the intent is to get them to school safely and on time. “Even though [it could be] a vendor [mistake], we have
to be vested because it’s still the School District of Phila- delphia,” Marcucci added. On the West Coast, Oakland Unified School District
in California contracts all aspects of its transportation operation. Kimberly Raney, the executive director of transportation, said despite contractor Zum handling all routing, the district maintains final approval. The district reviews all generated routes before school starts, evalu- ating ride length and pickup order. “We know the families, so we will get on a call and go
through each route,” she said. The district can log into the Zum dashboard to view
students and make changes, though Raney said she prefers a single point of contact for updates. Families contact her in-house team directly, and any chang- es — especially for students with IEPs or specialized equipment needs — are reviewed internally before being entered into the system. “Zum basically takes our data … they’ll transport it into their database, then they route, which then translates over to their parent app,” she said. Oakland’s 87 school sites can set their own bell times,
which complicates routing and sometimes requires vans to offset schedules. Still, visibility is strong. The district monitors a live dashboard each morning, and Raney said on-time performance in February was around 99.7 percent.
She acknowledged that past vendor relationships were
not always as cooperative. Understanding that vendors operate businesses with budget constraints is key, she said. “It’s the cooperation of understanding that it’s not
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