School District Saves Money and
Enhances Services with GPS

Forsyth County School District in Winston-Salem North Carolina was getting bombarded with 25 parent calls each day on average claiming that the school bus missed their child's stop again. So the Transportation Manager would send the bus back to pick up the child. Now the bus was late. And it wasn't just late for THAT school's drop-off, but now it was running late for the other two school runs it still had to complete.

The School District's Transportation Department had no real-time visibility into their daily school bus operations. They had no way of knowing where their buses were or had actually been at any given time. So when a parent called-in, they had to take the complaint at face value and turn the bus around to return to pick up that child; despite the bus driver's claim that they did stop at the assigned bus stop and there was no one there, as well as the unlikely-hood that the bus could be missing so many stops. Not only did this make the bus late, but it also cost the school district more money in fuel and administration costs to deal with all the calls. And the additional miles driven daily reduced the fleet's efficiency and minimized the years of operation for each bus.

Everyday Solutions, Inc., the leading provider of GPS-driven Transportation Information for K-12, solved these problems and more for this district, with 368 regular school buses and a ridership of 30,000 students, with two solutions EveryPoint, advanced GPS tracking hardware that tracks and captures vehicle data and EveryWhere Pro, a powerful automatic vehicle location (AVL) application. Together these solutions track each and every bus in the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County fleet, giving the Transportation Department complete visibility into their daily bus operations. The GPS hardware on the buses tracks their exact location with updates every 10 seconds the fastest in the industry. This information can be viewed on any web browser by the Transportation Department with an easy to use mapping interface from Microsoft's Bing that shows the location of each bus as well as where, when and how long it stopped. Now, the Transportation Department knows exactly where their buses are all the time. And if a parent calls-in claiming the bus didn't stop at their child's bus stop, they can say with certainty that it did stop and even give them the precise time of the stop. Rhonda Fleming, Winston-Salem/Forsyth County School District's Transportation Director said of the solution, "Now I have accountability I can show exactly where the bus stopped and when. I have a report that proves it stopped that I can send to parents."

The benefits to the school district have been numerous. Winston-Salem/Forsyth County saved money by:

• Reducing the number of miles driven every day
• Decreasing the wear and tear on their buses which have prolonged their buses life by reducing the number of miles driven each day
• Reducing the number of complaints to the Transportation Department and the associated administrative costs
• Increasing school and parent satisfaction with consistent on time school bus arrival
• Creating accountability that bus drivers perform their routes as designed and making stops at the designated locations and time. Thereby, building integrity with the public and school district.

When asked why she chose Everyday Solutions, Inc., Ms. Fleming said, "Everyday Solutions has more capabilities and was more cost effective than its competitors."