Boston Schools Develop GPS Bus Tracking App for Parents

(TNS) — Parents of Boston Public Schools students will be able to track their children’s buses using a GPS-based app this coming school year, said Principal Mary Skipper.

“With the start of summer transportation, BPS transportation has begun using Zum… which includes the introduction of GPS navigation tablets on our school buses and the Zum mobile app for BPS parents and guardians,” Skipper said during a School Committee meeting last week. “With this Zum app, we are committed to improving transparency, reliability and convenience for students and families using BPS school buses.”

With the new GPS technology and app, Skipper explained, parents and guardians can “view bus assignments for their students, track bus rides in real time, receive automatic delay notifications and bus arrival alerts, and receive notifications when students board and disembark from the school bus.”

The new technology was introduced earlier this summer on buses carrying about 3,000 students for the extended school year, the school’s testing initiative, special education and other programs, according to the superintendent. By the end of the first week, nearly 90 percent of bus drivers were reportedly able to verify that Zum was working to track their routes.

The district intends to ensure that “all bus drivers and transportation personnel” are trained on the technology before the start of the school year, Skipper said, and also develop a plan to help parents and guardians learn how to use the app.

BPS Transportation Director Dan Rosengard noted there will be a “learning curve” as the number of buses increases from 200 in use this summer to 640 in the fall, but the team is preparing for the change.

The change comes after BPS made slow progress on a number of transportation issues over the past year, improving both its school bus driver and paramedic staff. In a 2022 agreement to avoid a state takeover, the district agreed to upgrade buses that were chronically late, didn’t meet special education needs and had other problems.

The district had been using paper driver manuals, Rosengard said, noting that some of the previous “biggest challenges” were drivers trying to navigate a route for the first time. The GPS navigation system should help all drivers, but especially backup or replacement drivers, navigate routes with fewer incidents, he added.

The system will also help track passenger count data to improve system efficiency, as well as track late buses and identify issues in real time.

“We’re still learning the system and trying to figure out exactly how we’re going to use all of this information to improve our operations and our (standing operating procedures) and everything else,” Rosengard said, “but it gives us a lot more real-time information that we didn’t have before, so we can go from a reactive mindset to a proactive mindset.”