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New Routing Features that Offer Flexibility For Schools

by | Jun 30, 2020 |

Districts nationwide are currently preparing for the fall semester and some of the biggest concerns we are hearing are about social distancing and preparing for different scenarios for the 2020-2021 school year. Most school districts are in discussions of what the plan will be, but some states have already made statements about the fall . Gov. Greg Abbott in Texas has confirmed that students will be returning to school this fall. Additional states such as Illinois and Virginia have announced a return to the classroom as well, both notating that things will look different for students. It is expected that many states will announce further plans in the upcoming weeks.

The planned precautions that districts are putting in place are going to require flexibility for many departments, including transportation. We have been hearing from many districts that their current software or manual process either cannot match their needs or it will be extremely time-consuming to make adjustments. If the past several months have taught us anything, is that flexibility for last-minute changes will be a necessity.

Our main mission has always been to provide our customers with tools and features that increase the efficiency in their district. Since the announcement of COVID-19 and school closing in the Spring, our development team has been working to create new routing features, incase new procedures were introduced.

 

NEW Routing Features that Offer Flexibility

  1. Sandboxes: Use separate sandboxes to work out different potential scenarios, such as social distancing routing, or a split schedule (A day/ B day) route planning without affecting your current routes.
  2. Auto Generate Stops: Available within Sandboxes and in your default scenario, Auto Generate Stops provides flexibility in allowing you to generate stops based on the walking distance from a student’s home to the stop. Generate stops can be created for school and/or grade-specific distances.
  3. Optimize Trips: Available in Sandboxes, Optimize Trips can automatically reduce trip distance whenever possible. You can select the trips you want to optimize, and Travel Tracker Routing will take care of the rest for you.
  4. Split Trips and Combine Trips: Split Trips can easily reduce the original # of students onboard to 50% capacity levels (or more/less) to seat riders apart from each other. Combine Trips can reverse the process and quickly combine two roomy trips into one and automatically add school stops.
  5. Update existing transportation plans and bus schedules. With the current social distancing concerns, Update Current Transportation Plans and Bus Schedules enables you to quickly modify student transportation plans and bus schedules from M-F weekly to any selected day/s of the week and/or every other week.
  6. Summer School Routes: With our new version, whenever you have more than one session within a school year, you can change or define the student school for each session. For example, Alan Lee’s regular school is CMR ES, but in Summer School, his school is Blue Moon ES. You can select Blue Moon ES for him in the summer session and his regular school is not affected during the regular school year. Travel Tracker Routing will not cause any conflicts with the Student Information Systems data sync process.
  7. Auto rollover: Travel Tracker Routing automatically creates a future school year and consistently checks the student schools and grades in all sessions to make sure all students have the correct schools and grades in their respective years. No need to worry if your Student Information System rolls over before or after the Travel Tracker Routing rollover takes place. All you need to do is make certain the feed school for each school and grade levels are set up properly. Travel Tracker Routing handles the rest for you!

“And you know the biggest selling point is what you guys [App-Garden] offer. The people that stand behind it. The service you guys provide is second to none.”  – Farmington School District 

 Be prepared for the upcoming school year with a Routing system built to handle the upcoming changes!

 

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