Parents want to know where the buses are right now—and we give you the key to doing just that, effortlessly, reliably, and accurately.
Give Your Community What it Asks For—School Busing Information at their Fingertips
Installing GPS on school buses is a great idea—Edulog (Education Logistics, Inc.) has been doing that for nearly 20 years for school districts across the nation. Knowing where buses are, and where they should be going, has definitely increased situational awareness for school transportation operators.
But until recently, that valuable knowledge was hidden away in the transportation office, accessible only to those monitoring the system. If parents wanted to know where a bus was and when it might come, they still had to call an office and hope that someone answered the phone.
The Edulog Parent Portal app is the game-changer that parents are demanding—and that school districts need to provide.
Edulog’s solution to the problem of how to get valuable information to those who need it the most (parents) is an innovative parent-facing app for smartphones. Designed from the start using the best practices and features of popular apps for ridehailing and package delivery, the Edulog Parent Portal app is the game-changer that parents are demanding—and school districts need to provide.
“The rationale for Edulog’s Parent Portal is the fact that millennial parents account for more than half of the children riding school buses,” says Edulog’s president Jason Corbally. “This generation, the most technologically savvy in history, rely on their smartphones for instant information and two-way communication, and school transportation needs to satisfy this demand. Edulog is leading the way in this industry-changing shift to parent apps.”
The benefits of the Edulog Parent Portal app include:
- Parents can see on their smartphone screen where a school bus is in real-time.
- Alerts tell parents when the bus is about to arrive.
- Deployment is almost immediate.
- Edulog does the heavy lifting for you.
- You control the messaging.
- It’s free for parents to download.
Just having GPS is not enough to meet the demands of modern school transportation—you must have a way to broadcast this information in real-time to parents.
Uber and Lyft have dramatically altered the world’s mobility landscape, and Edulog brings a similar experience to school districts and their communities: a secure communication platform that gives parents accurate, real-time busing information with the benefits of instant messaging and alerts, two-way communication, and a user interface with tremendous appeal.
We work with you the whole way through to make you a success.
What Makes the Edulog Parent App Unique?
The entire solution can be implemented within a day! Because it was designed with school district and parent convenience as the primary guiding force, it’s as easy as just asking Edulog for the plug-and-play GPS hardware and for our company to set-up parent registration.
Parents then download the app free of charge from either the Google or Apple app stores, and you’re off and communicating! Edulog works with districts to develop a comprehensive deployment plan for the community—this ensures a high rate of adaption and acceptance, and parents will know how the app works and what to expect from it.
And with the Edulog parent app, there’s no increased burden on IT staff—Edulog takes care of placing the system in the cloud where it is secure and available 24/7. We don’t just say to a district that the parent app can be downloaded from the app store and leave it at that—we work with you the whole way through to make you a success.
Do Parents Love It?
Indeed, according to our clients.
“The feedback from our community has been wonderful after deploying Edulog’s Parent Portal,” says Dawnett Wright of University Place School District in Washington state. “The parent facing mobile application is allowing parents to view transportation schedules and track their child’s bus in real-time, while providing the transportation department an avenue to communicate to our parents via direct messaging.”
And according to Tom Cohn of Helena (Montana) Public Schools, “The community feedback has been tremendously positive. The app is a tool our district cannot live without and I highly recommend it to any district.”
Do you have a driver shortage? Use the Edulog app to tell the community about an upcoming job fair!
How Does the Messaging Work?
Messages can be sent to all of the parents in a district or any subset that you can think of: just one school, only one bus run, the parents of all sixth grade students, or even an individual parent. You’re given total flexibility and control with the Edulog Parent Portal app.
For example, if a bus breaks down mid run, dispatch can use the app to notify all parents further along the run that a new bus has been sent to complete the trip to school and explain the reason for the delay.
“Every transportation department struggles with timeliness at one point or another due to unforeseen circumstances. Now, we can communicate directly to parents’ smartphones so that they have more information and control over their mornings,” explains Kathy Prickett of Katy Independent School District in Texas.
The unique advantage of the Edulog app is that you can deploy it almost immediately.
Do I Have to Have a Routing System to Use the App?
No, not at all—that’s the genius of the Edulog solution. If the parent knows their child’s ID, the bus number, and their own address, then the system is immediately set-up to show bus locations, arrival alerts, and messages from the district.
Of course, as the leading supplier of student transportation management systems for the past 40 years, the Edulog app can be fully integrated with the leading route management systems on the market. In addition, optional Parent Portal features can be added at any time as the district finds more creative ways to use the app.
Can This App Enhance the Community’s Perception of the Transportation Department?
Most certainly. First, it gives parents an up-to-date communication tool with the benefits of the leading commercial apps (beautiful map displays; real time, easy-to-understand GPS data; customizable displays and alerts selected by each parent). The extensive messaging capabilities also provide the community with information, and broadcasts the “We’re All In This Together” message that is so important to transparency.
Sending a message that bus 15 will be ten minutes late this morning is communication. But adding to the message with “the reason for the delay is that the driver needed to go back and pick up kids whose bus had a flat tire is transparency; the community is told that delay wasn’t the result of any perceived inefficiency, but rather it was caused by an emphatic response to make sure that all students were delivered safely to school.
And because parents volunteer (“opt-in”) to use the Edulog app, they are more likely to open, and trust, any messages they receive. In addition, the district can give out much more relevant and detailed information with the app than what can be delivered by TV and radio announcements, district websites, and auto-dialers.
One enormous benefit: the Edulog parent app can be used to automate the processing of transportation requests and assignments.
Will This App Reduce the Transportation Department’s Workload?
Yes, because the need for parents to call the department or schools about busing is greatly reduced. One district using the Edulog app has reported a 75 percent decline in the number of phone calls from parents—and that’s not even counting e-mail or text messages. And even if transportation staff enjoy talking to parents on the phone, implementation of Edulog’s Parent Portal means less staff multi-tasking with more time to concentrate on efficiency (processing transportation requests, dealing with bus substitutions, planning for the next school year).
And, as an optional feature, the Edulog parent app can be used to automate the processing of transportation requests and assignments: from the parents’ requests, through the approval and assignment process, and then back to the parents with a notification of school bus stop location and time.
How Can I Find Out More About Edulog’s App?
Click here to streamline your transportation communication or email us at info@edulog.com. We’re more than happy to give you a demonstration of Edulog Parent Portal, answer your questions, and brainstorm with you how this app can benefit both your school district and your community.
“Staying connected with the entire community is of critical importance to school districts,” says Corbally. “And with Edulog’s Parent Portal, transportation departments can play a crucial role in this strategic process of informing the public.”
