SEATTLE, Wash. — Zonar, the leader in smart fleet technology, today announced Zonar MyView, a next-generation app providing parents and caregivers details and location information into the school buses their children ride on every day. The route-agnostic app comes with a dispatcher portal that enables school districts to quickly deliver information and allows easy management of general school bus communications to users, including the ability to send messages within the app to keep parents and caregivers informed about late-running buses or bus substitutions.
“We understand the challenges parents and caregivers face in making sure children are where they need to be at the right time. Schedule changes and even vehicle substitutions can cause very real problems,” said Christopher Dean, business intelligence and analytics coordinator at Dean Transportation and Dean Trailways. “We anticipate that Zonar MyView will be an outstanding tool to ensure dispatchers can communicate clearly and quickly to parents. This will give parents peace of mind while improving the effectiveness of proactive communication.”
The school bus remains the safest way for students to get to and from school. However, school districts still face numerous daily challenges when it comes to ensuring that student travel happens as efficiently and safely as possible. Across the industry, school bus driver shortages have led to inexperienced drivers and an increase in late bus arrivals. This causes more inbound calls for dispatchers to manage, approximately 90 percent of which are from parents asking about school bus location or a late or missed bus. MyView gives parents and caregivers real-time visibility into where their children’s school buses are and reduces the inbound calls school transportation departments receive, allowing them to better manage their time and responsibilities.
“Zonar MyView increases the school bus information flow to parents and decreases unnecessary dispatcher interactions,” said H. Kevin Mest, senior vice president of passenger services at Zonar. “Parents and caregivers have a tough job so we’re pleased to help address some of the challenges caused by lack of information. Enabling them to check on the school bus whenever they want means one less thing to worry about.”
Not every family structure is built the same, which is why MyView allows a custodial parent to set up a student’s profile and bus information within the app. They can easily and securely share their child’s information with other caregivers, as well as edit, add, or remove other users. With shared access, all authorized guardians who expect the child to arrive at a specific destination can view that school bus’s location. Parents can also build custom zones within MyView to better accommodate their schedules by setting up email or SMS alerts for when the bus is approaching. They can add multiple zones for different drop-off destinations such as daycare, sporting fields, or a caregiver’s house. Plus, when managing multiple zones within MyView, parents can link each zone to relevant buses, eliminating unnecessary alerts.
Before the release of MyView, Zonar customers were encouraged to use SafeStop, a school bus tracking solution from a trusted partner. The SafeStop product has been discontinued as of April 2020. To help your district prepare for the coming term, you can learn more about MyView here: https://www.zonarsystems.com/solutions/myview-bus-tracking-app/
About Zonar
Founded in 2001, Zonar has pioneered smart fleet management solutions throughout vocational, pupil, mass transit and commercial trucking industries. Zonar’s mission is to enhance the safety, performance and success of our customers by transforming the delivery of innovative insights for commercial fleets around the world. Zonar achieves this by helping fleets of all sizes maximize the use of their assets with solutions dedicated to improving compliance, efficiency, maintenance, ridership visibility, safety and tracking. Cloud-based services with open APIs drive Zonar’s smart fleet solutions by making it easy for fleet owners and managers to stay connected to their fleets and drivers and operators to dispatch. Headquartered in Seattle and part of the Continental family, Zonar also has a Technology Development Center in downtown Seattle, a regional office in Cincinnati, and a distribution center outside of Atlanta. For more information about Zonar, go to www.zonarsystems.com
