Are your bus drivers doing everything they can to look after any special needs students riding the school bus?
Are your bus drivers doing everything they can to look after any special needs students riding the school bus?
BusBoss does a great job of automatically locating addresses, but there are times when it cannot find the school’s location. When this happens, you can use google maps to manually locate schools in BusBoss. Here’s how…
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.
School bus route optimization requires accurate map data. Different map sources are available but there are several aspects of map data that determines its quality.
Nobody likes to think about accidents or medical emergencies, especially when you’re also thinking about school buses and students. Accidents do happen. Medical emergencies do happen. It’s important that we prepare for them. One important thing you can do is to make sure you have details of each student’s special medical conditions on the school bus.
Not all students will have special medical conditions, but for those students that do, you should have the information available to the school bus driver, EMT’s and paramedics that may be dispatched during an emergency situation.
Using a high quality school bus routing application like BusBoss will certainly help to make this information available to your drivers. During an emergency situation, the driver can provide this information to emergency personnel so that appropriate treatment can be given to the students. Often times this information is available in your student information system, which is a convenient place to keep it for everyone except the bus driver. BusBoss allows special medical conditions to be imported in to the BusBoss database. This information will then print on various reports which can be given to the driver for storage on the school bus.
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.
Expectations are high for schools to provide transportation that is cost-efficient, safe and accountable. Schools are tasked with making the most of their resources while delivering A+ service to their students, parents and communities.
