The benefits of improving school transportation extend far beyond buses - Closer coordination with the business office and becoming a more data-driven operation helped our district address a variety of issues.
By Scott Whittemore, Assistant Superintendent of Business, Queensbury Union Free School District
Queensbury Union Free School District is located in upstate New York next to the small city of Glens Falls, NY, and it ranks among the top school districts in the Capital Region for both academic achievement and fiscal efficiency. We currently enroll about 3,000 students across four schools on a single campus.
I have been the assistant superintendent of business at Queensbury for the past ten years and have a background in school finance administration and as a certified public accountant.
Seeing an opportunity for improvement
We have a great transportation department. Their strengths have been having thorough knowledge of our community and having an outstanding safety record. But we saw an opportunity to establish more coordination between the business office and the transportation department, and to use technology to become more data-driven to improve efficiency.
One of the catalysts for change was the pandemic, which changed so many aspects of the school system. Because of state mandates about social distancing and limits on numbers of
students on each bus, we were forced to use more data than we had before. That opened our eyes to some possibilities, but also to some of our challenges.
Post-pandemic, there were lingering issues. More parents were driving students to school than in the past, and we also started to see more chronic absenteeism and less participation in sports and extracurricular activities. That was concerning for our clubs and sports, but we also know that students who are involved in these activities generally do better academically.
Access to extracurricular activities
We found that a lack of transportation was an obstacle to involvement in those activities, as well as regular attendance at school. Many parents had conflicting work schedules, or had a
second job, or were single parents. We needed to be more flexible to meet the needs of students and parents, and we knew we needed to use data and technology more effectively to do that.
One of the tools we invested in was Routefinder PLUS from Transfinder, a platform that uses AI to automate the process of developing more efficient school bus routes. We use Routefinder PLUS for our routing and mapping and our general bus schedules. It has helped us tremendously.
Getting those students picked up and dropped off isn’t as simple as it sounds. There are only so many drivers and buses, and so it comes down to using data to build the most efficient routes and adjust driver schedules, so you meet the needs of everyone. Routefinder PLUS enabled us to do that.
A wide variety of benefits
As a result, we have seen big improvements in student attendance at school, as well as an increase in participation in sports and clubs. Improving our transportation operations was
an important part of that.
Another benefit has been driver retention. Most school districts across the country are dealing with driver shortages. I have heard about school systems that have had to cancel after school activities, or sporting events, because of driver shortages. But in our district, we haven’t had to do that, thankfully. There’s still turnover, but if you support drivers like this, by using resources like Transfinder that prevent things from being so last minute or chaotic, and you have good planning and communication, it makes their jobs easier and less stressful, and they are more likely to continue in the job.
Another tool we use from Transfinder is Servicefinder. Our service garage in the past was heavily paper-based, and the parts inventory wasn’t very well organized. By using Servicefinder to put a modern inventory system in place, we have saved a lot of money and kept the buses safer.
Today, our parts inventory is closer to being in real time, we have parts when they are needed, and we know when they’re running low. We have a lot more visibility into how we’re
scheduling maintenance.
Communication with parents
Another area where we made significant improvements was in parent communication. Transfinder’s parent app, Stopfinder, alerts parents when their child is nearby on the bus and almost home and lets them know if the bus might be a little late.
That might not seem like a big deal, but the volume of phone calls our dispatch office would get from parents asking those types of questions was very high in the past. That’s extremely time-consuming and stressful for staff and creates a lot of chaos in the office. Using Stopfinder and having parents download the app has helped to significantly reduce the number of calls, which has been such a relief, and it has also improved everyone’s productivity.
Continuing education
This past spring was the first time we attended Transfinder’s Annual Client Summit, and it opened our eyes to even more capabilities and what the platform could do for us. The ongoing training that Transfinder offers can expand your scope of the possibilities to find
greater efficiencies that could result in saving money, improving services, or both.
For a lot of district business officers or instructional leaders, I think it can be hard to envision some of this. You might have an instructional background, or an accounting or finance background like I do, but you don’t know much about school transportation. It’s something you just want off your plate, you don’t want to have to think about.
But by investing in a platform like Transfinder, and looking at the data, you might not realize that improving transportation can address or even solve a lot of other problems. Collaboration between the business and transportation departments is hugely important.
Even if by improving efficiency you can carve out a few minutes here or there for transportation staff, support staff, or principals, you give them more time to focus on more important things. That can have a big impact.
Navigating an electric future
Electric buses are a new rapidly growing trend in much of the country. New York has a mandate that bus dealers will have to sell a certain percentage of EV vehicles by 2027. What a lot of people don’t realize is how much more important data becomes with electric vehicles.
You have to know exactly what level their batteries are charged, and the distance they can travel before needing recharging. If there’s a sports game too far away for an EV bus, you need another vehicle. And you must think about what time you charge them; peak vs. off peak hours on the electricity grid could make a significant difference in cost. It’s going to take a lot of data and coordination. So, I’m glad we have Transfinder to help us navigate that future.
We’ve made significant improvements, and our transportation operations are much more data-driven now, but there’s always room to improve further. I’m looking forward to what we do next.
