From left: Marion Mack, the supervisor of the South Carolina Department of Education’s Richland bus facility, and David Stagg, the state’s IT consultant, prepare for the arrival of Tyler Technologies solutions that promise to streamline routing across the Palmetto State.


come the first in the nation to have a real-time view of all routing operations on one platform, according to Tyler Technologies. The partnership traces its roots to 2016, during the development


of the Multi-District Model, or MDM, feature of the company’s next-generation Traversa solution. It is designed for use by large transportation departments to better manage operations at mul- tiple locations. Ted Thien, vice president and general manager of Tyler’s school bus division, likened MDM to the ability of a large company or group of companies utilizing an accounting solution to “roll everything up in a common balance sheet.” “We took that idea and applied it to routing software, and Tyler is the first company to successfully accomplish this feat,” he said. South Carolina proved to be the perfect test model. After seeking feedback on product development from South


Carolina officials, Tyler responded to an RFP the state issued in 2017 to develop a three-district pilot program that would mimic a statewide network. Tyler’s bid won, and the company deployed Traversa, GPS and its tablet. “It worked so well, they added two more districts into the pilot


process,” Thien relayed. “These districts were geographically close to each other, and SCDE used Traversa to gain efficiencies among the districts.” As the new school year kicks off this month, the SCDE is


looking for more than a few school districts to sign up for the technology and help begin phase one of the rollout. Initially, the state anticipated a third of the school districts would partic- ipate this fall, shared David Stagg, an IT consultant to the SCDE, though COVID-19 has since tempered those expectations. Still, the agency is confident most if not all districts will even-


and operated out of 42 facilities statewide. It was prepared to launch a new program with Tyler Technologies to offer Traversa school bus rout- ing, Tyler Telematics GPS and Tyler Drive tablets to all 79 public school districts, when COVID-19 shut down the world and school buses large- ly ground to a halt. Not an opportune time to announce a five-year, multimillion-dollar tech- nology acquisition. But as Albert Einstein once said: “Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.” After all, the state is poised to be-


tually choose the Tyler suite. After all, as relayed by Bill Tindal, the director of business and district services in the SCDE’s central transportation office, the state is footing the bill. But beyond that, there is firm belief in the technology’s power. “At the state level, we will be more easily able to run reports on [the state] fleet and the reports will be accurate,” Tindal explained, adding that consistency of the various routes, exported data and communication have been common challenges. School districts must submit to SCDE headquarters in Colum-


bia up to 30 different reports or forms that cover everything from special needs and general education route descriptions, to per- mitted miles, to road hazards. But, as Stagg shared, all the districts are operating at different levels. “Some of them are still doing paper-based reporting, others


have their homegrown systems or other systems that gives us different sets of data,” he explained. “It’s time consuming to get us to where we can compare apples to apples. Sometimes, trying to get the district to send the right data file in the right format can drag into a week or more, depending on who is available and which IT guy gets involved and who can send the


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