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on Johnson’s technology was put to the test on April 16, when about 25 percent of his driving force was pulled into the high school during a building lockdown. The director of support op-


erations for Indian Prairie School District #204 in Illinois explained that a shooting incident occurred a block away from one the elementary schools. One was person was shot and two others took off running. Johnson recalled the incident happened at about 1:30 p.m., an hour before the high schools dismissed. Bus drivers were to start heading out to pick up students at 1:45 p.m. It was at this time that police had notified campuses located in neighborhoods far from the search area to begin a controlled release—students walked to a bus one by one and then police secured the bus before allowing the driver to leave. But a district incident command meeting instead


decided that buildings located within a mile radius of the incident would be locked down to keep students and staff safe while police searched for the shooting suspects. The bus drivers for a high school pick up were already


in front of the school awaiting students. Those drivers were pulled into the building, and Johnson immediately lost the services of 52 members of his driving force. “And that’s when we were like, alright, who’s avail- able? What drivers did we lose? What routes do we not have covered?” he recalled, noting that his staff had only about 25 minutes before other high schools across the district not impacted by the lock down would be dis- missed. And because his bus drivers complete multiple tiers, Johnson said middle and elementary schools would also be impacted. He said it was all hands on deck, working with the communications department to instruct principals to


not contact dispatch, but instead to await communica- tion from transportation personal. “Utilizing Tyler Drive [tablet], radio systems, messaging capabilities of the Tyler Drive itself, we knew who we had available based on the GPS data. We knew what routes were covered,” he said, adding that parents were notified to pick up their chil- dren, if possible. The software was able to instantly combine routes on the backend and send push notifications to driver tablets of their updated stops and/or routes. He said dispatchers viewed everything from route headcounts to driver loca- tions, to see where route consolidations could be made. He added the Tyler Drive made it easy to add stops to routes. “I can add stops from other routes. What we are doing


now is saying, okay, we need you to cover these three stops from route two. And then we would add those three stops. The software would optimize the route, and the driver would load those students at that stop and go,” he said. He added that staff used GPS to assign drivers more


stops based on their locations, for example if they were close to a certain school. “We were just utilizing elec- tronic rollouts to make sure that all routes were covered,” explained Johnson. He noted that it was also easy to pinpoint where each bus was, should a principal or parent ask. “It was definitely mass chaos, but it was managed chaos to the best of our ability,” Johnson recalled, adding that some routes weren’t affected, especially if they only ran one tier or if they were located on the north end of the district. Radio traffic was “absolutely atrocious” because


dispatchers were trying to communicate between seven middle schools and 21 elementary schools, said Johnson. The district had three dispatch centers with six dispatchers relaying information, calling drivers


Tech Super User: Ron Johnson Ron Johnson, the director of support operations for Indian Prairie School District #204 in Illinois,


was hired in July 2017. Previously, he served as a transportation and purchasing business manager for a different school district. Prior to that, he worked with one of the largest logistics companies in the world.


He said Indian Prairie is the fourth largest school district in the state of Illinois. The district has an


enrollment of 27,000 students, 67 percent of which are eligible for transportation. The district has about 250 school bus drivers running between 1,000 and 1,200 routes depending on the day of the week with a three-tiered routing system. Transportation services a 55-square mile district boundary to and from 35 district buildings, not including out-of-district students in special education pro- grams.


54 School Transportation News • SEPTEMBER 2024


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