You wake up before the crack of dawn to get ready for another day in the school district’s transportation office. As you get ready for morning pick-ups, you think about all the challenges that await.
Everything that can possibly go wrong runs through your mind. How many times will the phone ring today? Will one of your drivers not show up?
We understand that student transportation can be brutal — but it doesn’t have to be that way. There are ways to keep your buses on the right track, ensure optimal operations, and reduce the chances of things going wrong.
Here are 7 strategies to make life easier as a student transportation professional:
Optimize Your Routes
Creating efficient routes is instrumental to any school district’s success. Yet, routing remains one of the most tedious and time-consuming tasks for transportation staff.
Do you still use a whiteboard to pen out all your routes? If you do, it’s time to look for a solution that can help you plan routes efficiently and free up your schedule to work on other things.
Enter school bus optimization software — all the tools you need to address all transportation bottlenecks. Here is how optimization can help transform your processes:
- Reduce Slack Time: Some inefficient routes may lead to higher idle time between stops. Optimization tools help you see how long your buses spend at each stop, allowing you to address inefficiencies.
- Edit or Create Routes: Analytical data from software can uncover inefficient routes, making it easier to see which routes you need to edit to save time and lower operating costs.
- Resource Allocation: If one of your drivers has time for coffee breaks between runs, it probably means that other buses are working twice as hard. With the right tools, you can uncover operational gaps by allocating routes based on drivers’ schedules.
Modern optimization software for school buses uses AI to give you greater visibility about inefficiencies in your routes and find solutions that save your district time and money.
Streamline Workflows
Managing student requests can be a hassle. It’s important to have a student transportation online forms platform that allows you to manage everything from one place. The right software tools can help you establish automations and streamline operations with a few clicks.
- Save Time: Make life easier by automating common requests and accessing historical records for past forms from your archives.
- Eliminate Redundancies: Tired of dealing with parent phone calls? With workflow management tools, you can improve stakeholder communications with online forms to reduce incoming parent calls.
Learn how Miami-Dade County Public Schools in Florida was able to automate parent requests with BusPlanner Workflow.
Ensure All Zones Are Well-Defined
Defining geographical boundaries for every run can be a challenge, especially without the right tools for the task.
Redistricting modules for school districts can help make life easier in many ways:
- Manage School Boundaries: Whether you need to create new boundaries or edit existing ones, redistricting tools can help you change the lay of the land with a few clicks.
- Generate Statistics: Need to know how many students are on a bus in a given run, or get more high-level data? Software can provide all the information you need.
- Mark Danger Zones: Safe student transportation is a win for all. St. Johns County School District in Florida greatly appreciates the ability to mark danger zones based on data from the local sheriff's office using BusPlanner.
Stay on Top of Fleet Maintenance
Keeping your buses on the roads is critical for success. Even a single bus going out of commission can be a significant blow, especially for schools with smaller fleets.
While mechanical breakdowns occur, there are ways to avoid unexpected costs and downtime. Here are some ways school bus fleet management software can help you do just that:
- Engage in Preventive Maintenance: While we all may be well-versed with the benefits of engaging in timely maintenance, it can be challenging to keep track of maintenance records without the right tools in place.
- Keep Your Inventory in Check: With most of the school buses on the road being around a decade old, it’s important to have parts on hand in case something breaks down. If you’re aware that a specialized component will need replacement, inventory management tools can help track if they’re ready or need to be ordered.
Plan Your Budget Out Effectively
Managing finances is always challenging. A 2019 report shows that only 3% of the total funding in the education funding in Texas was invested into student transportation.
Not only does that impede the adoption of new technologies for transportation departments, but also makes it harder to compensate staff, which has resulted in the worsening of the driver shortage.
While the amount of funding transportation departments receive may be unfair, there’s not much we can do except work around this challenge.
It’s always better to plan ahead, but expectations don’t always translate into results. Financial planning software for student transportation helps you compare planned costs with actual costs, enabling you to identify areas of improvement at your district.
Maintain Proper Stakeholder Communication
50% of respondents in a BusPlanner survey reported that communication with parents is the most important in their school district.
Student transportation management software enables districts to streamline communication with all stakeholders. With this software, you can:
- Improve Internal Communications: Convey messages to everyone in your transportation department. Whether you want to relate a message to a driver or any other staff member, advanced tools put you in the driver’s seat with secure student transportation communication tools.
- Coordinate Operations: Access route-specific information, provide turn-by-turn directions to drivers, and convey details to substitute drivers using powerful mobile apps for student transportation.
- Coordinate With Parents: Parent apps for school districts are a valuable tool. They support two-way messaging for smooth operations, allow parents to track their children’s buses, and ensure data security at all times.
Reassign Routes When Needed
Imagine this: everything is going according to plan, when suddenly one of your drivers doesn’t show up. Which of the following do you do?
- Have a meltdown while trying to figure out how to manage it.
- Use software to make life easier.
Using school bus dispatch software, you can minimize any disruption to operations by reassigning routes allocated to absent drivers. Advanced tools allow for easier route splitting and reassignments based on geographical location and driver schedules.
The Bigger Picture
Student transportation is brutal, but it doesn’t need to be. By partnering with a student transportation platform provider like BusPlanner, you gain access to the right tools to eliminate guesswork, streamline daily operations, and tackle every challenge.
Get in touch with us today to transform operations at your school district.
