Parents whose children ride a bus to one of the Montour School District sites will soon be able to use an app on their phone to check in on them during their daily trips.
The district board of trustees made that possible last month by approving the purchase of the Athena Edulog Parent Portal software for use on 30 of the district’s buses.
The software cost the district $10,400 and will cover the entire 2025-26 school year.
The software is designed to give parents the ability to track live bus data on their phones, and the district hopes it will improve communication with parents.
“That’s the whole goal,” said Brian Churovia, the school district’s director of transportation since January 2023.
Churovia said communication with parents is essential but challenging for his department, which has just three people – a secretary, a part-time dispatcher and Churovia. That’s for a department that’s in charge of transporting about 3,300 students.
“It’s frustrating not being able to communicate with parents a much as you would like,” Churovia said. “This is a big step forward that hopefully will help with that.”
Churovia said the new app should help give parents some peace of mind if their children are late arriving because they’ll be able to use the app to see where they are.
The district launched a pilot program earlier this month that covered four buses, and 90 parents signed up to use the portal.
“Things are going well,” Churovia said of the pilot program.
If that continues, the program could be extended to all the bus routes serving students at Montour Elementary, David E. Williams Middle School and Montour High School.
The district purchased 30 GPS units for buses earlier this semester and the Athena Edulog Parent Portal software is the second step in the plan to keep parents better informed as to the whereabouts of their children while they’re heading to and from school.
The Montour district actually has 62 buses and serves students in 45 schools or school districts, but Churovia said the district wanted to roll out the new parent portal system slowly, focusing on the routes that serve just the three Montour schools.
“We didn’t want to dive in and get it for everything,” he said. “We hope to have it on all 62 buses, but we don’t have a date for that yet. We’re trying to do it in sections.”
Churovia said having GPS capability on the buses is a plus and so far it’s going well.
“Having real-time data gives us a lot of advantages when we’re trying to see where a bus is,” he said.
Churovia said some of the biggest “hiccups” for his department when it comes to busing children to and from school are construction projects and substitute bus drivers.
“There’s a lot of construction in the area – some companies communicate and some do not,” he said. “There can be all kinds of surprises, and that can be a drawback.”
Substitute drivers, Churovia said, can provide challenges because they’re not always familiar with the routes. “And that can cause delays,” he said.
Still, Churovia said the district is “overall pretty good being on time.”
Information provided by Edulog claims that the new parent portal and app can reduce phone calls to a district transportation department “up to 75% because parents will have the bus information they need in the palm of their hands.”
Churovia said once the program is launched, parents will need to create an account and then log in with their name and their child’s bus number in order to access the system. Churovia said the district can implement privacy settings that will enable parents to track their child’s bus only during certain hours.
In addition to giving parents the ability to see their children’s bus routes, the portal system will enable the district to send messages to target audiences. For example, the district could send an alert to parents of a specific route if that route is running late.
“If it works well, this will go a long way toward helping with parent communication,” he said. “It’ll help both ways – when we’re late and when the parent is late. Hopefully this will help alleviate a lot of stress.”
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