Goddard Public Schools’ transportation team placed first overall in the Kansas State Safe Driving Competition (AKA the State Bus ROADeo)
In Kansas, Goddard Public Schools has transformed its transportation operations by implementing Transfinder’s Stopfinder app, a move aimed squarely at solving one of the most common parent concerns in school transportation: Where’s my kiddo?
Under the leadership of Transportation Director Sean Hollas, the district’s adoption of Stopfinder has brought real-time student tracking and communication to the forefront of daily operations.
“It’s been really good,” Hollas said. “It’s not without its challenges, but the parent feedback has been really good.”
Hollas didn’t arrive at this role through traditional channels. A U.S. Army veteran and former educator, Hollas was recruited by his superintendent to take on what he initially thought would be a one-year challenge: helping solve a severe driver shortage.
“We were so short of drivers that a bunch of the elementary routes were either combined or they would have to take one set of kids home and then come back to the elementary school and pick up a second load,” he explained. “It was just awful.”
Hollas focused on recruiting, eventually hiring 61 people and adding 11 bus routes, enough to eliminate the need for combined and double-tiered routes.
With the staffing crisis stabilized, Hollas and district leadership turned their focus to modernization.
“We decided we were going to modernize technology,” Hollas said. “We invested in Stopfinder and we invested in Servicefinder.”
After piloting Stopfinder on a single route in December, the district began a phased rollout in January, onboarding each of its 13 schools over the course of a few months.
“Between January and about the end of March, every couple weeks, we added another school, and it’s been really good,” he said.
But introducing any new technology into a school system comes with complications, particularly when student safety and privacy are involved.
“We tell the school board, ‘Hey, this is what we’re implementing,’ so that they know,” Hollas said. One board member raised concerns about non-custodial parents with legal restrictions gaining access to student information through the app. “And that is a valid concern. While it’s probably not going to happen, you’ve got to be prepared.”
To address that concern, Hollas and his team developed a manual workaround. Because Stopfinder pulls data from the district’s student information system, Skyward, Hollas has to remove students with flagged legal concerns from Transfinder prior to deployment (about 20 out of the district’s 6,600 students).
“They get added back automatically in the middle of the night when the two sync,” he said.
Although Transfinder offers account banning features, Hollas said his assistant superintendent wanted to avoid granting and then rescinding access. “So he chooses, ultimately, to do it the first way.”
Despite that complexity, Hollas praised the usability of Stopfinder, particularly from the parent perspective.
“I’ve used a lot of software over my life, and it’s probably one of the easiest things from a user perspective. Parents had almost no questions,” he said. “3,400 riders are my daily average and I probably had five questions where people couldn’t figure it out.”
To drive parent adoption, Hollas relied heavily on text messaging.
“Parents are much more responsive to text than they are email,” he said.
For schools without legal-exclusion cases, he texted all families, advising them to expect an email from Stopfinder and instructions within the app. Where exclusion cases existed, the district defaulted to email communication.
As with any tech rollout, there were hiccups. Some parents overlooked emails, missed expiration windows for app invitations, or simply wanted help navigating setup. But Hollas built a sustainable support process by empowering office staff to handle basic account reactivations.
“One of the ladies that works in my office, her job primarily is my drivers’ trainer, and I just showed her and my secretary how to reactivate people and send them a new password and link.”
This year, Transfinder awarded Goddard Public Schools as a Top Transportation Teams 2025 winner.
Looking ahead, Hollas hopes for further improvements to streamline onboarding, especially for new families.
“It would be nice to just have a QR code or something to say, ‘Hey, if you’re new to the district or if you’re new to transportation, all you have to do is scan this and sign up for Stopfinder.’”
Until then, Hollas is focused on what matters most, keeping students safe and helping parents stay informed.
“From the school standpoint, there’s still problems with parents when their kids get on the wrong bus and we don’t know it,” he said. “But with Stopfinder, we’re making real progress.”
To learn more about Transfinder, email getplus@transfinder.com, call 800-373-3609 or visit transfinder.com.