Antonio Civitella founded Transfinder in Schenectady, New York, with some sweat equity and a vision of providing solutions to everyday problems.
Over time, the company provided routing solutions by using GPS and efficient route optimization for school buses nationwide. What used to take hours of cumbersome labor to figure out now took minutes if not seconds to achieve, and with greater accuracy.
Along comes the pandemic of the century and of our lifetime. So, Civitella figured, why not apply that same strength of route optimization for some little things, like allowing a private school principal in his hometown to place a sign of appreciation on each of her teachers’ front yards?
Kelly Sloan, the principal at St. Madeleine Sophie School in Schenectady, New York, took Civitella up on his offer to develop a route to visit all the teachers. In four hours and 50 minutes, she traveled 120.57 miles across the district and delivered signs.
The tale may not have the sophistication the industry usually thinks of when discussing how artificial intelligence can solve today’s issues, such as logistics. But for the principal of a small school district who took on a big endeavor, technology worked.
Indeed, technology is often the elixir for many great big challenges. But it also works for smaller ones, like recognizing valued teachers with lawn signs, pandemic or no pandemic, and helping boost the morale of the often-forgotten figures in education: the teachers.
Editor’s Note: Stay tuned to read more about how A.I is transforming the school transportation industry amid COVID-19 in the July issue of School Transportation News.
