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The Indiana Daily Student

education

MCCSC parents can track their child's school bus with new app

Parents no longer have to worry about their kids missing their buses or standing in the rain when it’s late. There’s an app for that.

The Monroe County Community School Corporation has partnered up with a GPS tracking system app to keep kids and parents updated on their bus schedule and bus whereabouts.

Last December, the MCCSC unveiled a rollout plan for launching the Here Comes the Bus mobile and online application.

Here Comes the Bus paired the district’s existing GPS system with a friendly interface for tracking bus arrival time at each stop, according to the MCCSC 
website.

The app officially became part of the MCCSC system in March, and is used at the elementary, middle and high school level.

The application offers two levels of subscription to customers.

The free level has users enter a corporation code, establish a free account and have the ability to track their child’s bus through an onscreen map.

For a small subscription fee, a parent could establish a “geofence,” or a radius around a given location, providing alerts when a bus entered that radius or was approaching the designated stop.

Parents of Jackson Creek Middle School students, one of the three middle schools in the district using the app, find this app useful in their families.

Principal David Pillar said parents of this age use it to balance the kids’ 
freedoms.

“For our age group, parents are getting more comfortable letting their students get home and get themselves inside after getting off the bus,” Pillar said. “It is comforting knowing when the bus is there so that ‘check-in’ phone calls are made easier.”

The app gives parents a real-time location of their child’s school bus on a computer, tablet or smartphone device.

It also provides email alerts and push notifications to help parents send their students to the bus stop at the right time.

Andrew Clampitt, public relations and information officer for MCCSC, said the app has steadily increased in usership since March of this year.

The service has increased users since the end of the previous school year in May to the beginning of this school year from 172 active users to 1,440 active users as of Aug. 16.

The application is powered by software from Synovia Solutions, a company that provides GPS tracking systems in corporations with large numbers of 
vehicles.

Here Comes the Bus is free to all families in any school district that has purchased the GPS service.

All services are school district based.

The application can be viewed on any smartphone, including Apple iPhone, Samsung Galaxy or Blackberry.

Users can track multiple buses at one time, know exactly when their children arrive at school or home and keep kids safe on their way to school with this information.

The app not only can track the student’s location, but the location and behavior of the buses in relation to the student as well.

Facebook users have used the app and contacted the MCCSC Facebook page to voice their concerns of the app.

One user commented informing the corporation of a bus driving too fast in a 40 mph zone.

Clampitt said usership has increased since last March.

When the app was released to the school district in March, active usership was at 64 active users, but has increased to 1,701 active users today in the district.

“We do know it’s working just from word of mouth,” Clampitt said. “It’s been a really good add to our 
corporation.”

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