In days past, back when school systems had better finances, gas prices were reasonable and parents had actual relationships with their children’s school bus drivers, there was little need for tracking school buses and other transportation.

Have you ever wished you could keep better tabs on your drivers while they're on the road?

The Job is quite demanding, and for the right reason. For a transportation manager,  the passengers are the most prized assets in the country, and the loss, injury or undesired treatment of any of them is not acceptable. In transporting students safely and efficiently, a lot of work has to be put in to anticipate every turn and incident in protecting their interests.

The responsibility that comes from running a school bus system is enormous. Every day, hundreds or thousands of parents trust you with the single most precious thing in their lives, believing that you'll get their children to and from school without incident. And, on the whole, this is what happens.

Running a good transport software solution for your school district’s transportation needs shouldn’t break the bank. And it shouldn’t take a degree in computer science to operate, either.  There are a lot of affordable transport and routing software options out there, but they won’t be much help to you if you don’t understand how to properly use them.  The main thing to know is that the more details you input into the software, the more effective it will be. But let’s look at the steps in more detail:

Consider the scenario where you manage more than 100 buses in the district. You assign each bus with a primary route and another bus as a standby. While the routes are in session, you experience three breakdowns, and the communication systems that you are running break down. This means that more than 200 Children will be late for school all around the district. Three of your drivers call in sick, and you cannot get all of the standbys in, they are either unavailable or will get in too late. You switch to contingency and reroute about six buses for the morning schedule that were planned for the afternoon. Your schedule has been disrupted, you're quickly losing time, a few school principals have made calls wondering about the status of some of their kids, you begin to lose your patience as you bark at your staff to deploy the emergency vehicles to make sure everything is running OK.

As a parent and a school administrator, your greatest concern is the safety of your kids. You need to know exactly where they are, what they are doing and what their parents are saying about where they should be. With many incidents of child abduction and kidnappings, the school and the transportation system to school and back to their homes needs to be monitored to ensure all the kids are where they are supposed to be. In order to protect your students, you need to adopt a student tracker, which will give you an edge in making sure they are safe.

Let's be honest, these are tough times to be involved in school management. Pressures are mounting on all sides, with very few release valves available. School budgets are constantly being cut, so you have to make do with less each year, or so it seems. Yet, at the same time, the parents seem to demand more and more, especially when it comes to the safety of their children. This is totally reasonable, of course, but it still creates a fundamental problem: