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Edmonton Public Schools is one of three school divisions operating in the city of Edmonton, Alberta. With 212 schools to manage and a growing student body, effective transportation is crucial for the district.
The school district transports 17,000 students on 830 routes. Over 50% of these routes are for students with special needs.
The previous routing software used at Edmonton Public Schools was in place for over 20 years. Many of the features the school district needed were unavailable in the last system. This led to a lot of in-house software being developed at the district to supplement the gaps left by the previous software. Needless to say, this process wasn’t without several glaring issues.
“We were always in fear that one Windows patch or update could break the system. The software we were using before BusPlanner became a critical business risk for us,” Geoff added.
Geoff explained that there were four categories Edmonton Public Schools’s routing department was looking at when searching for a new routing software:
Adding on, Geoff said, “We created an RFP centered around those four concepts. After evaluating several options, we decided that BusPlanner was the best overall value for the organization in terms of each of those categories.”
Geoff said, “A lot of the time, we felt like we were working for our old system, but BusPlanner works for us to get things done.” The lack of collaboration with their last routing provider was also a huge pain point the school district had, which BusPlanner addressed.
The COVID-19 pandemic had just started when Edmonton Public Schools onboarded BusPlanner. With software implementation out of the way, the biggest challenge for the routing team at the school district was determining accurate student ridership.
“We saw massive changes in ridership compared to what we had initially planned. There were 3,700 fewer bus riders in the first week of school after the pandemic started. Even though we were new to BusPlanner, we were able to make those adjustments in the system really quickly,” Geoff explained.
The routing team was able to quickly identify that there would be fewer students needing transportation. This helped them remove runs that were no longer needed. “We were able to do that within a week of using BusPlanner,” Geoff said.
The routing team never encountered a situation with BusPlanner where his team was left without
answers.
Within a few weeks from implementation, Edmonton Public Schools' routing team was comfortable navigating through BusPlanner.
BusPlanner allowed greater flexibility for the routing team by providing timely updates to keep up with the industry.
Edmonton Public School’s team can easily communicate with contractors to provide accurate information to parents.
Haydn added that BusPlanner’s team always implements the feedback they provide, which makes the software better with every update.
BusPlanner helps the Edmonton Public Schools team save countless hours, translating into thousands of dollars every year.
Since switching to BusPlanner, the routing team has not received any calls from parents regarding pick-up times and bus locations.
With latitude and longitude data from BusPlanner, stakeholders get accurate details regarding stops and routes.
