By Meg Peters
Review Co-Editor
With the first day of school’next Tuesday’comes an opportunity for parents to be a little more in tune with their student’s schedule’knowing exactly what time their bus will arrive.
All it takes is downloading the new Lake Orion MyStop smartphone mobile application.?
The parents of year-round Carpenter Elementary school first piloted the mobile app MyStop, and after a few tweaks’Director of Transportation, Energy and Environmental Compliance’James Stottlemyer invites all parents to download the free mobile app.
The app tracks exactly where a student’s bus is on its designated route with an interactive map and moving triangle representing the bus. It accounts for delays from traffic or weather, and pinpoints and readjusts the estimated time of arrival to the student’s bus stop.
Once the bus passes the route stop, the estimated time of arrival disappears, and the app relays that the bus has already passed. If the bus is not currently on its route, users will be notified there are ‘no active routes.?
Parents will be mailed their student’s route information with instructions on how to set up their personal MyStop account, requiring their student’s identification number and birth date.
Simply download the VersaTrans MyStop app from the Apple App Store on iTunes, for iPhones or iPads, or for any Android device and plug in the required information.
‘With those super cold days when parents have to get their kids to the bus stop the nice thing is, if the bus is running a little late, the app gives them the window of when to get to the bus stop,? he said. ‘I think it’s going to be the interface and the communication link between us and the parents.?
Normally if a bus was late, parents would receive an email with an update, but Stottlemyer said this process is difficult with the amount of buses the district has.
So, designing the app was just the next step after the district installed the VersaTrans school transportation software on the fleet of 68 school buses two years ago.
Because the app uses the same GPS software to provide the smartphone mobile app, it was free, simply by repurposing the existing technology.
Not only will students and parents benefit from the app, so will school principals.
Each of the 11 schools in the district will be linked to a similar software module called Arrival Board, a program that shows each of the schools buses in route to the building. If a bus is teetering on tardiness, it will appear in the yellow category, and? if ‘buses will be late, they will be noted in the red category. This way students will not get marked down for tardies, Stottlemyer said.
‘We’re trying to utilize its full potential and power. We’ve got some other things in the works too,? he said.
The district is also preparing a program to assign predictive maintenance to the fleet to help catch issues before they happen. Another idea is to organize a system to better equip substitute bus teachers en route using similar technologies.
Stottlemyer said Lake Orion is leading the way in transportation technology.
‘Other districts have already been in contact with me to ask about it [the mobile app] because they are starting to get a lot of pressure from parents. Parents want to be connected and stay informed,? he said.
Editor’s note:
Many people have been trying to log in already, but receive the message, ‘The username/password entered is invalid.? The MyStop system is tied to our active transportation database. Currently, this database is set up for the Carpenter year-round school to handle summer transportation. The new database, for the upcoming school year, will be loaded at the end of this week at which time the application will work for all families.
In addition, the district wants MyStop users to understand that the system only works while their student’s bus is traveling on the bus route to and from school. When the bus is off the route, after hours, on weekends, etc. the map will not display a bus or bus route and the system will show, ‘No active routes found? at the bottom of the screen.