News & Events

Bus tracking awaits 9-1-1 addressing

 

Hampshire Review, Romney, West Virginia

By Jim King, Review Staff

Wednesday, May 23, 2012

 

ROMNEY — Transportation Director Calvin Davis thinks he can make bus scheduling and all the questions that go with it a lot easier, if he can only get some help from parents and the post office.

 

The main tool is in place, he told the Hampshire County Board of Education Monday night. That’s a software program called Transfinder that the board purchased six years ago.

“We are nowhere near using it all,” he told the board in a report on his just-completed training by the software’s maker.

 

He sketched a picture for the board of what can be. Transfinder can plot every bus route the county needs, with the homes of every student pinpointed on an electronic map.

 

All that’s missing are actual street addresses, an issue being resolved by Hampshire County’s slow adoption of 9-1-1 addressing.  Every road in the county has been named. Davis and Director of Technology Lori Roeder have loaded those into Transfinder.

 

“The downfall is the 9-1-1 addressing,” Davis said, “and that’s not Transfinder’s problem.”

 

The next step for Hampshire County is converting postal addresses from routes and box numbers to street numbers. Homes and businesses in Shanks received notification from the post office of their new addresses earlier this spring and the rollout continues.

 

“I’ve got my address in Delray,” Davis pointed out.

 

But parents need to update their addresses on school records. When that’s done, those addresses can be rolled from WVEIS, the giant recordkeeping system used in West Virginia schools, into Transfinder.

 

Then, Davis said, the real benefit of the system kicks in.

 

“A parent can go to our website, type in their address and it will show the nearest bus stop and the pickup and dropoff times,” he explained. The system is flexible enough, he said in answer to a question from board member Linda Baker, to allow alternate drop sites for students who might go home some nights or to a grandparent’s other nights.

 

It gets better. GPS transmitters on buses will allow real-time tracking of whether a bus is on schedule or not.

 

Tracking can extend further, Superintendent Robin Lewis said. Individual students can be given transmitters to clip on their book bags. Those signals bounce off satellites, allowing school personnel to know when a student gets on or off a bus.

 

Other components of Transfinder can monitor and schedule bus servicing, create routes and schedule field trips. Hampshire County schools are already using that last component.