Located just west of St. Louis in Clayton, Missouri, the Clayton School District (SD) is home to three elementary schools, one middle school, and one high school.
In addition to daily routing, the district coordinates transportation and drivers for field trips, sporting events, and other extra-curricular activities.
“We’re a small school district, but for a small district, we have a lot of field trips,” said Lauri Rainwater, the district’s administrative assistant to the director of facilities. “Our district is very hands on, and we do a lot of field trips where the students can go out and do a lot of hands-on things, so it’s important that we have a system that is personalized to our specific needs.”
In addition to her other extensive duties, Rainwater is responsible for scheduling all of the buses for field trips, athletic events, and various student activities, tasks requiring advanced technology tools to coordinate effectively and efficiently.
“We have only been using busHive for about a year now,” Rainwater said. “But we love it because we can personalize it to us and what our needs are.”
After several decades of using the same outdated system, the district began exploring software upgrades and options, ultimately deciding that upgrading their current system was the best choice.
“In the 20 years that we had been using our previous program, they never did any upgrades,” Rainwater said. “We couldn’t add any special columns, we couldn’t upload anything to it. Everything was paper driven.”
busHive develops software to streamline workflows and recordkeeping across the entire process. The technology manages online request forms, approval paths, and driver/vehicle scheduling to help schools and their transportation departments handle a normally complex, manual process.
“It’s really nice that each request form can be personalized based on your needs, what type of trip it is and everything else,” Rainwater said. “That was something that we didn’t previously have. With the old stuff it was one form fits all and that didn’t fit our needs.”
The trip scheduling technology gives teachers coaches the ability to easily submit trip requests electronically. Principals and other department leaders can conveniently review all requests and approve them. It also shows transportation departments essential information on drivers, vehicles, and billing
Going paperless was another big attraction for the district and its drivers. According to Rainwater, having access to a variety of critical information at the touch of a button has made a big impact for their staff.
“That was huge for us,” Rainwater said. “Everything that they do now is on their phone, which is great. The other thing is to be able to put vendors in and how much the cost was. It now goes over to our business office so that they can make sure that the request gets put in before the day of the trip. It’s got a lot of benefits.”
While transitioning from a decades old system had its challenges, Rainwater noted that rolling the system out to principals and support staff was a quick and easy process with busHive remaining in close contact via phone and electronic communications for troubleshooting.
“Because the district adopted the new system in the midst of COVID, there were very few actual trips to schedule,” Rainwater said. “So it just took a little bit to get used to. But once you do it a couple of times, it’s easy peasy. And I have a really good relationship with Jason, who did my training with me. Their customer service is amazing.”