Student transportation always brings a new set of technical challenges every year. Do you sometimes feel like you’re drowning at the start of a new school year?
Well, you’re not alone in feeling that way. In this article, let’s explore some ways to ensure you get off to as smooth a start as possible to the new school year.
1. Keep Your Fleet Maintained
Bus maintenance is absolutely crucial for success in student transportation. Here are some important things your transportation staff can do to ensure fleet reliability:
- Check Your Tires: Inspecting tires daily for changes in air pressure, nails, dry-rot, and tread can go a long way. Doing these walkarounds takes less than 5 minutes every day, but can save hours by alerting drivers to problems before they happen.
- Change the Engine Oil: Your fleet buses need to be reliable to keep parents happy and maintain ridership. Oil and filter changes prolong your engine’s life, so it’s important to stay on top of them!
- Repair Buses: While districts engage in regular maintenance throughout the year, summer is a great time to upgrade and repair your buses. Most districts experience lower student ridership during the summer months, which opens up opportunities to engage in preventive maintenance.
- Order Parts: 97% of districts in a survey reported that they struggled to obtain parts. Using a school bus fleet management system can help you check what parts you have in inventory and order new ones as needed.
If your student transportation platform doesn’t come with school bus fleet management tools, it might be worth investing in one to help streamline maintenance.
2. Communicate With Your Partners
There are two key teams who you’ll coordinate with throughout the new year:
Software Providers
If you use any software, it’s important to talk about your game plan with them. Whether your district has hired new staff members who need help with navigating the software, or you have other questions, your software provider’s support team can offer assistance.
If something doesn’t make sense, it’s always a good idea to chat with people who put the system together to help you understand things, especially when adding new riders and stops before the start of school.
Internal Teams
Communication is key, so it’s important to talk to everyone in your team to ensure things are going as planned. Discuss your new plan with the transportation team and get their feedback.
It might be a good idea to get other perspectives to see if there are areas of improvement in your operations.
3. Revisit Your Routes
Time to get some new students on the bus and increase your average occupancy. Sounds great; until you have to set it up. It’s important to accommodate the new riders and ensure that all the information is set up correctly. Here are some things your team needs to be mindful of:
- Enrollment Changes: There will be students who will start riding the bus, while others will graduate and need to be taken off the list. It’s important to double-check each student’s information to ensure maximum efficiency.
- Bell Time Changes: Any time changes need to be accounted for. Bell time analyzers are part of a complete student transportation system and can help streamline the update process.
- Routing Inefficiencies: Are there things your team can be doing better? It might be useful to look into your routes and find areas for improvement. An excellent way to do this is to check your school bus routing software to help optimize your routes.
- Stop Locations: Your bus stops should maximize operational efficiency while ensuring student safety. School bus redistricting software can sync with your local sheriff’s office to ensure there are no registered sex offenders near bus stops.
- Split Households & Special Needs Routes: Remember to make arrangements for students who come from households where parents have split custody. Additionally, it’s important to allocate the right buses to routes to transport special needs students.
Be Ready for the First Bell
While the new school year brings unique challenges, you’ve got this! Remember to stay patient and deal with challenges one at a time. Learn how BusPlanner can help you prepare for the new school year with our comprehensive student transportation platform!
