School buses transport millions of students each day to and from schools and special activities. During an average school year, around 10 billion student trips are made. Buses come in many designs and capacities and different districts have varying requirements regarding the age that each bus should be in service. Both of these factors, along with the size of your fleet, influence the total cost of school bus maintenance for your district.

Today’s technology allows parents and school district employees to determine if a student is on a bus, in real-time. The ever-increasing use of smart phones and tablets means that more and more people expect to have access to information about their children’s whereabouts so that they can act quickly should an emergency arise.

In the interest of helping you accurately estimate school transportation's
costs in the event of any planned field trips, it is instructive to review a short compendium of the most common questions asked by administrators and field-trip coordinators nationwide. Preparing for these actually tends to reduce school transportation costs because the answers facilitate better planning before the request for buses goes out, as well as make the field trip process more efficient overall.

There are certainly pros and cons to outsourcing student transportation, and many administrators hold strong opinions on the matter. With more and more districts facing the stark reality of decreased budgets, transportation outsourcing is becoming a common practice.

In the years of the coronavirus, RSV, strep and the flu - and with most researchers suggesting these will continue to be a threat in the upcoming years - school bus safety measures now largely revolve around finding ways to prevent spread of the diseases going around our schools. Most schools are doing this with traditional disinfecting products like sanitary wipes and sprays, but this is a slow and time-consuming process that can still miss a lot of contaminated areas.

How much oversight do you have over your buses, while they're on the road? If one suddenly came to an unexpected stop or deviated from its route without warning, how long would it take you to know?

For too many districts, the answer would be "a long time." Without being able to directly track buses on their routes, they're left with little way of overseeing bus's progress aside from relying on radio reports. And if the bus driver is unable -or unwilling- to radio in, they're basically in the dark. 

We keep waiting for the bus driver shortage to end, but it doesn't. For years now, schools have been struggling to find enough school bus drivers to keep all their routes running, and still the problem persists. According to recent studies, 24% of districts describe their shortage to be "severe" or "desperate," and another 38% report "moderate" staffing problems. Only around 10% claim to have no driver staffing issues at all.

In short, districts will have to continue to hustle if they're going to find new drivers, and keep trying new tactics. Here are some more things to try!