will continue to be triple-tier, with buses serving the 30 elementary schools first, then the nine middle schools, then the six high schools and four alternative schools. The route reduction—multiplied by the morning and afternoon runs—will save the district about a million dol- lars a year, since each route costs about $60,000 annually. It will also help Leander ISD address the school bus driver shortage that has been plaguing districts nationwide. “I’ve been driving, our routing department staff have been driving, our mechanics have been driving because we’re short bus drivers,” Simonsen said. “We hope and pray that by the start of this [coming] school year, we can be fully staffed, routers can do their job routing, and mechanics can do their job keeping buses running.” Meanwhile, the savings will help the district address a


multi-million-dollar deficit caused by changes in state funding allocation. “By transportation coming to the rest of the district


and saying, ‘We’ve done some homework, we believe we can save a million dollars, we’re trying to do our part to help this deficit go away,” Simonsen said. A decade ago, John Hanlon, then chief operating


officer of Boston Public Schools, was ordered to save $10 million. City officials pressed the district to accomplish it through transportation cuts. “We had a target on our back,” recalled Hanlon, now


CEO of AlphaRoute. Desperate for solutions and creative thinking, Hanlon


launched a hackathon seeking ideas to cut costs. A team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology led by professor Dimitris Bertsimas, a route optimization ex- pert, entered the competition. The resulting algorithmic solution ended up allowing the school district to serve its students with 50 fewer buses, saving $5 million. A few years later, Hanlon and Bertsimas founded


AlphaRoute along with transportation experts from MIT and other elite institutions. The company provides a full suite of transportation management software and also performs route optimization services for school districts and paratransit agencies nationwide. “It’s important to understand what optimization is and isn’t,” Hanlon noted. “Some people assume optimi- zation means lower bus counts. If that is the goal, then that is what it can mean, but it does not have to be about that. It might be about keeping the bus count where it is and improving the student experience. We can work with you to keep all of your policies intact including bell times, or work with you to change your bell times, do simulations, or even redistrict schools. Whatever that challenge is, we have the technical wherewithal to opti- mize your operations to meet that challenge.” Schools can adopt AlphaRoute’s software, or use Al-


phaRoute’s solutions with existing routing software, as Leander ISD did. The algorithms used to analyze and rebuild routes


28 School Transportation News • MAY 2026


use machine learning, which is a form of AI but not an example of generative AI. For that, AlphaRoute is rolling out a new offering, an AI assistant named Alphie AI, that can help districts by responding in real time to data queries and routing challenges. For example, “daily [driver] call-offs are a problem for school districts everywhere,” said Hanlon. “What districts can do at 5:30 a.m. is make a plain language query to Alphie: ‘What do I need to do to my routing system to cover all our routes and minimize delays today?’” He noted that typically in situations like this, other


bus drivers would scramble to cover the missing driver’s routes, before or after their own. “You’ll drive your run, then go back and start Bill’s run,


and guess what, all of Bill’s kids are late. Then you have two more runs of your own, and now everybody is late,” Hanlon explained. “Our system will look at not just at your route, but the other routes that serve Bill’s schools or are driving in that area. Where is all their work taking place? How can we carve up Bill’s runs so that different drivers can each take a few stops seamlessly into their routes?” The bus driver shortage was what motivated the School


District of Manatee County in Florida to turn to Al- phaRoute for help. About five years ago, the district south of Tampa Bay had drivers on 150 routes transporting 52,000 students over 700 square miles. By the fall of 2022, the district was forced to cut their routes to 106, but the shrinking driver pool could not deliver students on time. Jamie Warrington started with Manatee County as


director of transportation services in fall 2021 and con- tracted with AlphaRoute about a year later. The company helped the district cut a dozen routes to 96 total and optimized them in a way that led to much better service. “I had some concerns about how a lot of our routes


were routed when I got here. A lot of them were criss- crossing, not a lot of thought had been put into them over the years,” said Warrington, who is also president of the Florida Association for Pupil Transportation. “They kind of morphed into inefficiency.” Meanwhile, Henrico County Public Schools in Virginia uses Samsara GPS Fleet Tracking software that provides data to help the district make routing decisions in its Edulog software. “We can tell how efficient our routes are, and we can also track our students and have a good idea how many stu- dents are riding,” said Director of Pupil Transportation Jim Ellis. “If this bus only has 25 [students], and that bus only has 25 [students], we look at combining those routes.” In other words, Ellis is doing route optimization, but


sometimes using data paired with analog human anal- ysis rather than machine learning and AI. GPS software like Samsara also offers route optimization, and Henrico County’s routes were originally built and are also period- ically optimized that way, Ellis said. “We have specialty schools, different bell times, and


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52