How do you track transportation?

Tasia Weatherly
Tasia Weatherly
Ninth Anniversary Kudos 1 Name Dropper Facilitator 1
in Blackbaud K–12 Education Solutions™ General Discussions

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!

Comments

  • Lauren Marcus Eisenberg
    Lauren Marcus Eisenberg
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 Name Dropper Participant

    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
    Lauren Henderson Community All-Star
    Fifth Anniversary Kudos 5 July 2026 Monthly Challenge bbcon Sessions First Reply

    Our school uses Cariina to manage bus transportation.

  • Dyvar Anderson
    Dyvar Anderson
    Fourth Anniversary Name Dropper Participant Facilitator 1

    @Lauren Henderson Does Cariina integrate with Blackbaud?

  • Jo Giesecke
    Jo Giesecke
    Eighth Anniversary Kudos 1 Name Dropper Facilitator 1

    @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
    Lauren Henderson Community All-Star
    Fifth Anniversary Kudos 5 July 2026 Monthly Challenge bbcon Sessions First Reply

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

  • Kelly Maddox
    Kelly Maddox
    Third Anniversary Kudos 1 Name Dropper Facilitator 1

    @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.

  • Art Bryman
    Art Bryman
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 3 Name Dropper Participant

    Has anyone set up a way to manage bus transportation in BEM?

    Here's our process:

    1) Parent fills out a route request form, requesting a specific route, and 1 or more stops they plan to use

    2) Parent signs a waiver

    3) Student is put on a list for that route, shared with the route drivers

    4) Bus drivers MUST have a roster, allowed pick-up people, and allowed stops

    I was thinking of this process:

    1. Create a resource page
    2. Put 2 BEM forms there as links
    3. Create either an Activity or Community group to track which students are on which bus

    How do I automated this process? Can parents/students even request to join a community group? I know they can request to join an activity. Can I create an "Entire School" group, or do I need to create one for every division (to enable Requests)? Has anyone done this?

    TY!

  • Geoffrey Goodfellow
    Geoffrey Goodfellow
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 Name Dropper Participant

    We do similar to what others have described above. We have a Blackbaud School Form that gathers the transportation information from the parent. (Prior, this needed to be published to parents, but as of last week, now you can just share the URL, and the parent can self-publish if they wish to use the form.) Our transportation folks receive notifications of submission of this form, and they also have access to export the data from this form into Excel, which they use to import into their Transfinder software which actually assembles the routes and times. Once the school year starts and all routes are assigned, we do a data import into a Custom Field on the Core Contact Card.

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