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For years, Prince George’s County Public Schools ran one of the country’s largest student transportation operations on legacy tools, manual workarounds, and the institutional knowledge of whoever happened to be in the room. PGCPS partnered with BusPlanner on a phased rollout, and the picture started to change.
Students served across 200+ schools
Buses with accurate multi-run tracking
Depots rolled out in phases
When Keba Baldwin stepped into the role of Director of Transportation, the department was running on legacy tools, manual workarounds, and institutional knowledge. Basic questions like who’s eligible, who’s routed, and where the buses are didn’t have consistent answers. For a district serving 135K students across 200+ schools, a fleet of 1,100+ buses, and 12 depots spread across 500+ square miles, that level of inconsistency was unsustainable.
PGCPS’s previous system had one critical limitation: it couldn’t track multiple runs assigned to the same bus. With over 200 driver vacancies, the team relied on substitutions, double-backs, and split runs every day. When foremen reassigned a bus to cover multiple runs, GPS tracking broke down, the parent app showed inaccurate information, and families had no idea where their child’s bus actually was.
PGCPS began working with BusPlanner roughly six weeks before the start of the school year. Rather than risk a full-fleet conversion under that timeline, Keba and his team took a phased approach designed to catch issues early and build adoption depot by depot.
Started with the most stable routes and smallest student population for a controlled testing environment.
Rolled out across 12 bus lots one at a time, rather than risking a full fleet conversion at once.
Each phase was evaluated before moving forward, catching issues early before they could repeat.
Trained bus lot foremen first the people managing daily coverage and substitutions.
BusPlanner Dispatch gave PGCPS the capability their previous system lacked: the ability to track multiple runs on the same bus during the same tier time. When foremen reassigned runs to cover any absences, those changes flowed directly through to the parent-facing Chipmunk app in real-time.
For the first time, every daily run, including reassignments and split routes was captured in the system accurately.
Staff who once avoided the tools were asking for BusPlanner help within months. Foremen went from skeptics to champions.
Parents could track their child's bus even when routes were reassigned that morning, restoring confidence in transportation information.
With accurate tracking in parents' hands, the volume of inbound status update calls and emails dropped significantly.
The shift from pen-and-paper operations was more than just new software, it needed a change in mindset. Keba’s strategy was to identify champions at each of the 12 depots: staff with the drive to learn the system and model adoption for their peers. Early on, staff avoided the new tools. Within months, the reception was completely different.
PGCPS’s rollout is still in progress, with tablet deployment for drivers on the horizon. But the results are already visible. Keba’s biggest takeaway applies to every large district running on fragmented systems and manual processes: you don’t have to fix everything at once.
Phase your rollout, train your frontline staff early, find your champions, and invest in community engagement alongside the technology.
The work happens in the depots. Foremen, dispatchers, and drivers are the people who make a modernization stick. Train them first, give them champions among their peers, and the rest of the organization follows.
PGCPS’s experience is a case study in exactly that: a phased plan, frontline buy-in, and the willingness to measure progress in months and quarters, not weeks.
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