Pam Sheppard, routing technician at Union County Public Schools in North Carolina, creates routes for the new school year using Edulog’s routing software. The district underwent “the big three,“ which consisted of changing the bell times, consolidating bus stops and double runs.
referrered to by the company as Student Transportation, to create the routes. Freeman said he goes back into the system to determiine if there are any unbalanced bus loads based on school’s enrollment and makes changes accordingly. To cut back on the number of bus drivers needed, the district is running double trips in the morning and afternoon. He said a driver will perform a run and drop those students off at school maybe 15 minutes earlier, and then return to pick up and drop off another group. “We’ve worked with the schools to bring in kids early,”
Freeman said, adding that the school staffs the cafeteria, and it serves as an extra study group, homeroom activity area. “Then we’ll run another route and drop those students off on time.” Additionally, the district just took its transportation
services in-house, after contracting out. The company was also suffering from a driver shortage, and the district was having a hard time getting route changes to the drivers, which influenced the decision to take the routes on themselves. “It was a combination of the school committee
asked us to look at it originally about 10 years ago for cost,” Freeman explained. “We started doing exercises based on cost, and then over the years the service has just decreased mostly due because of staffing issues. We looked at trying to take it in-house not just for the cost savings but also for better control over the routes because it’s hard to get information from a vendor when
46 School Transportation News • OCTOBER 2022
they’re short staffed and they’re running trying to cover everything the best they can. It’s hard for them to explain to us and then us to try to relay the information to the schools and the parents. It was not happening. We’re not saying that the service would be any better [in-house], but we could have better control of communications and then hopefully improve upon the service as we go.” Freeman explained that this school year, in addition to
the routing software they already had, the district added Tyler’s parent app, tablets and student RFID cards. With the tablets, district officials can move a school off one driver to another, if a driver is running behind. “Then that driver will get the alert that they have a new school and then it gives them [direction] that the driver can just follow,” he said. “It’s helped [with] that aspect of moving the work around between drivers for coverages, but is also helped because we have trained over the summer 22 new drivers and just to have those new drivers be able to follow a tablet instead of a paper route sheet. It’s helped with the confidence of the driver.” Freeman added that the bus contractor didn’t have tablets, so twice a week the transportation office would download and print the route information (which changed frequently given they update their routes anywhere from 500 to 1,000 times per week based on student enrollment, bus stop changes, students moving, etc.) and then give it to the vendor. The vendor would then have to give it to the actual driver for them to implement.
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