Kansas district benefits from EDULOG’s solutions

FORT LEAVENWORTH, Kan. — A school district here that is located inside a military base is using EDULOG’s solutions to help in addressing the unique challenges it faces in transporting students.

In addition to being inside a military base, Fort Leavenworth School District, USD #207, provides transportation for some students to areas outside the district, which makes keeping track of students a challenge.

"Does a student get lost? Does a student ride the bus? Usually something like this happens every day," Director of Transportation Jerry Litz said. "Sometimes it’s a parent who picks the student up without telling the other one, or they board a bus for an afterschool program on the base that we don’t do transportation for."

The district has also dealt with military transfers, an increase in housing developments, and staffing and budget concerns. Litz said that the student turnover rate is “fairly high,” and with the housing developments, there are a lot of changes to routes.

"Everyone in the transportation department has different jobs," Litz said of the staffing challenges. "I work on transportation and groundskeeping, which keeps me busy during football season and doing snow removal. Our other operator drives a bus and does three special-needs routes, and the other guy is probably 80% groundskeeping and 20% transportation."

Litz contacted EDULOG to find a solution to meet all of his transportation needs. Officials said EDULOG worked with the district to install RFID readers on all 19 of its buses and to provide RFID tracking cards for the students, and they installed EduTracker software to help integrate the entire system.

The system has been in place for over two years now.

"We notice the system every day,” Litz said. “We find about 98% to 99% of the students who have these problems with student tracking.” He added that any remaining students he finds using methods like calling parents or afterschool programs.

"We’ve never lost a student," Litz noted.

EDULOG’s routing software has also helped him in dealing with Fort Leavenworth’s rapid housing expansion.

"Making a change to a roadway is easy; it doesn’t take many clicks," he said. "If we have students on a new street, next year we’ll have twice as many on that one street, so it helps to know ahead of time how many buses you have to send out."

Litz also speaks to EDULOG’s technical support.

"Because our district is so small, only 19 buses, I think we notice things more than other districts," he said. "The reliability has gotten a whole lot better. The data works, and that’s what we notice. There’s always a glitch that comes up now and then, like any software, but someone in tech support always takes care of it."

Other news related to EDULOG:

• EDULOG grows staff by 20