can’t argue with tha” she relayed. “Drivers also have photos of who is allowed to get students off of the bus, and some drivers allow the students to ‘tap themselves’ on and off of the bus, which is fun, and provides very accurate ridership data for routing.” Weston Bartlett, director of transportation in Melissa ISD Texas, said he was looking for a way to ensure his student’s safety with Tyler Drive tablets. His district, which is located north of Dallas, has a student enrollment of about 3,300 and is expected to continue growing exponentially each year. “My drivers love the tablets
now, because Tyler Drive is very easy to use,” said Bartlett. “The older ones were reluctant, which is understandable if you’re still using a Jitterbug phone.” Tyler’s Traversa Ride 360 pro-
vides additional peace of mind, added Bartlett. He pointed out that schools take attendance all day, and then place kids on a bus, but do not know where or when they got off. Bartlett cited a perfect example of this problem. “The
police called when I was home at the dinner table. They wanted to know if a student rode the bus home,” he recalled. “Before, I would have had to go back to work, which would take over an hour. With Traversa, I just pulled out my laptop and told the police that the student had left the bus at 4:15 that day at his home. Having answers quickly reduces those moments where you’re holding your breath,” he related. Jeremy Bricks, transportation supervisor for the Palmy-
ra-Macedon district in upstate New York, said he is pleased with how Tyler Drive Tablets and Traversa have worked for his district. Bricks, whose district is small enough that he and his head driver perform the routing, began gradually rolling out the tablets at the end of the last school year. His older drivers were initially resistant. “We’d been working with the new Tyler program for
about a year while I input routes, but I was still using our old routing program for the paper route sheets until the end of the school year,” Bricks said. “Then, I didn’t give tablets to all of the drivers at once, but only to a few who I knew would give honest feedback. They loved the conve-
First Student’s Dean Suhre and Tyler’s Ted Thien display the tablet.
nience, and if we discovered some bug, I’d call support.” As a new customer, Bricks said the district has a dedicated
Tyler representative who takes care of any issues promptly. “We had some problems with the program meshing with School Tool, but that’s fixed now,” Bricks added. “Once the tablets were in every driver’s hands, the feedback was 100-percent positive, especially with our subs, who now have a photo and name of [all] student [riders].” Palmyra-Macedon’s drivers knew the tablets were
coming, but this summer was the first time that Tyler Drive was used exclusively for routes. “I handed them a tablet, and it’s been working perfectly, except for one issue that was my fault,” Brick laughed. “The drivers are used to finding their routes by bus number. When I made up the summer routes, I wasn’t sure which buses I was going to be using, so I gave them names, like BOCES [Boards of Cooperative Education Services]. Drivers were coming to me, unable to find their routes, and then it dawned on me that it was only the substitutes. They were trying to find a bus number. Chalk that up to experience.” Bricks said he loves the 65-inch monitor in the depart-
ment office that shows where each bus is in real-time. In the event of a breakdown, he said he can assign selected stops to various buses. “I can see that a bus is
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