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Kevin Addison (at left), the transportation coordinator for Orangeburg School District, discusses the capabilities of the Tyler Drive tablet with David Stagg, an IT consultant to the South Carolina Department of Education.


file. Something as simple as sending a list of routes can be time consuming.” But Tyler’s MDM, which was piloted by five districts in 2017, aims to change that. It offers a level of auto- mation that is quickly taking hold across the nation. Thien explained that any large fleet can benefit from GPS hardware to understand how the school buses are performing. Simply put, SCDE staff can access a dashboard to ex- tract data without putting the onus on individual school districts, observed Chris Gabriel, Tyler’s sales director. “It gives the state that visibility and allows the districts to be able to focus on their day to day,” he explained. “The technology that we can provide with the business intelligence dashboard and single sign-on sets us apart. It creates transparency and upward communication. It ensures full reimbursement via student ridership and ultimately creates more efficiencies so that money can be reallocated in other areas where the state needs it.” All participating districts will also receive the Tyler Tra-


versa Ride-360 parent app. About one-third of the school buses, those with wheelchair lifts and dedicated to special needs routes, will be equipped with the Tyler Drive tablet. “Our districts can expect a lot of benefits,” shared


Raymond Poore, SCDE’s training and routing coordi- nator. “First and foremost is the ability to streamline the actual routing portion of their job, determining the best routes for the school buses as well as maximizing the student loads without compromising time to get the kids to school. The other aspect is tracking of assets, making sure that they know where their buses are at all


48 School Transportation News • SEPTEMBER 2020


times without having to do a lot of guesswork. If there is a question whether a bus is staying on route or off route, they will be easily able to check that.” It wasn’t too long ago that school bus drivers working


for Orangeburg School District, serving 32 campuses across a 90-mile area located about a third of the way between Columbia and Charleston to the southeast, were using paper maps and marking stops they had previously made. “They would give us the turn-by-turn directions and we would type it into the state report,” recalled Kevin Addison, the district’s transportation coordinator. But then the district was selected for the MDM pilot.


Traversa and GPS tracking provided streamlined report- ing built from the ability of dropping student locations into online maps and easily assigning them to buses. “With GPS, I can track my buses within 30 seconds to


one minute of their location,” he added. “Being in a rural area, that helps a whole lot because, if I should have a bus break down and I’m looking at a map, I can see what resources I have in the area. That way, we don’t have kids sitting [in] a hot or cold bus waiting on mechanics to get there.” And the district doesn’t have to wait until mid-October to submit the required route reports to the DOE. “When other transportation folks ask me about tech-


nology, I tell them, ‘Don’t fight it. It makes life a lot simpler,’” noted Addison. Still, school district choice remains in South Carolina,


as does a litany of technology options. Greenville Public Schools has used Edulog for the past three years and has no plans on changing, said routing and scheduling co-


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