Customer Case Study: Beaufort County Schools

“Managing school trips was total chaos.”  – Jerry Wynne

Jerry Wynne, the director of transportation for Beaufort County Schools in North Carolina, described the challenges they confronted in managing school trips.  Even in their relatively small district of 13 schools, they were conducting over 500 athletic and field trips every school year.

A Complicated Process

While teachers or coaches typically initiate a school trip within Beaufort County, making the arrangements and securing approvals means following a set of guidelines established by the district.  These can be complicated and involve several different people:

• Superintendent
• Principal
• Funding Manager
• Transportation Director
• Nutrition Manager
• Curriculum Advisor
• School Board (some trips)

Costly and Inefficient

School administrators in the Beaufort County School district had been managing this process with email, telephone calls and a great deal of paper.  The result: a costly and burdensome process, prone to breakdowns:

• Paperwork was sometimes misplaced as permission applications moved from the teacher to the principal to the superintendent, and further along the approval chain.
• Paperwork sometimes needed to be resubmitted.
• Teachers had no easy way to track the status of their applications.
• Key people, such as the nutritionist, were sometimes left out of the process.
• Schedules for trips were difficult to coordinate.
• Requirements for transportation were difficult to coordinate.
• Charges to particular schools were hard to account for.
• Deadlines were missed.

Selecting Travel Tracker

Looking for a better way to manage school trips, Jerry worked with other administrators and identified criteria they would require for a more efficient solution:

• Automatically route school trip requests to the appropriate people for approval.
• Track and notify teachers and others with the status of trip requests.
• Alert people when requests are delayed.
• Automatically schedule transportation.
• Report on mileage and other charges.

The administrators needed a solution that could be configured to fit their specific requirements and the particular approval process that is in place in the Beaufort County School District.

They were also aware that managing the entire school trip planning process involves more than just transportation.  Besides scheduling buses, the solution they needed would manage permissions, approvals, and notifications that would cover teachers and administrators in several departments.

Comparing the Travel Tracker experience to their old paper-based process, Jerry Wynne explained “It’s awesome.”

Based on the Beaufort County School district’s previous experience with Cook Consulting, they identified Travel Tracker as a solution that could meet their requirements.  They deployed the solution in late 2012 and have found that it supports a much more efficient school trip management process.

Travel Tracker Efficiencies

• Provides functionality needed to handle the entire school trip planning process.  It does not focus only on transportation.
• Automatically tracks and notifies all parties of a trip application’s status throughout the approval process.
• Configured to conform to specific district’s guidelines governing school trips.
• Supported by a responsive customer support organization that understands the particular requirements of school districts.

About Travel Tracker

The Travel Tracker solution automates planning for school trips, allowing teachers and administrators to better manage permissions and approvals, transportation, staffing, meals, and expenses.

Unlike manual processes that require teachers and school administrators to use paper forms, email and telephone calls to manage trips, schools can take advantage of Travel Tracker’s single trip proposal form, automated routing, tracking, notifications, and rapid reporting features.  The result: less paperwork, more useful school trips, and more productive use of teachers’ and administrators’ time.

Travel Tracker is part of the app-garden suite of solutions developed by Cook Consulting.  Contact us for more information or to schedule a live demonstration.