How do you track transportation?

Tasia Weatherly

Hey everyone, I'm curious if folks could share how they handle transportation/bus route registrations while using Blackbaud's Education Management products. Our transportation department has been doing everything manually for decades and we're trying to figure out how best to collect bus route registrations from families and store that information in a place where our transportation department head can easily manage it. The simplest thing I could think of was to use school forms and collect the information in a form field, then import that into an admin custom field (we are already using all of our regular custom fields), but the downside to that is someone other than the transportation department head has to manage this. The person in this position is not the most tech savvy person so we're making slow changes.

So does anyone use other systems, spreadsheets, forms, etc to collect and manage their transportation information in tandem with Blackbaud? What has worked best for you?

Thank you!

Lauren Marcus Eisenberg

A good chunk of our transportation/busing is private and arranged by my colleagues. I've created Admin Viewable Only fields (Bus Route / M-F AM, Bus Route / M-F PM, etc. ). My colleague gives me the data, and I do a Data Import to populate the student records.

Lauren Henderson

Our school uses Cariina to manage bus transportation.

Dyvar Anderson

@Lauren Henderson Does Cariina integrate with Blackbaud?

Jo Giesecke

@Tasia Weatherly
We created a form in Blackbaud parents are required to complete. It has a link to bus routes. They pick the correct route, then there is a drop down for the bus stops. We export this and create a Google sheet which we share with our Transportation Director. It's a process, and we still do a lot of management because we include dismissal plan for each primary student for each day of the week.

Lauren Henderson

@Dyvar Anderson not easily. We do exports from blackbaud that they upload into Cariina.

Kelly Maddox

@Tasia Weatherly Last year, we started using a Blackbaud partner called SchoolPass that does EVERYTHING from transportation to dismissal plans. We can track arrival and dismissal choices. Parents can communicate through an app about absences, tardies, mid-day dismissal changes, and more.