For decades school districts have been attempting to achieve the elusive goal of efficiency through the use of transportation management software. Software solutions for routing, maintenance, personnel tracking, and field trip management which once were considered the cutting edge play toys of the most daring transportation departments, are now a “given” for any district seeking to make the most of limited resources. Over the last several years these mature technologies have been complemented by a new sibling that promises great rewards, but also carries many pitfalls for the inexperienced: Online trip request software.

Unlike the software of generations before, online request software does not merely affect a few members of the transportation department, but offers a technology platform for all departments and personnel of a school district. It is easy to see the potential benefits of eliminating paperwork, streamlining approval processes, and decreasing the need for repeated communication between requestors and the transportation department to check status or correct errors.

Jan Fink of Greece Central Schools, New York, has been using an online request system in her district since 2006. With the ability to set required fields, approval paths, and budget codes, much of the guesswork for her requestors has been eliminated: “Anything that you can do automatically is going to save time and staff,” she states. In Alamance North Carolina, Trip Coordinator Terri Webster agrees: “Our online request system has saved us time by being able to ‘track’ the requests in the approval chain; before we just knew that they had not reached us yet. Also, we can view requests before they get here and correct any problems making the turnaround time much quicker.”

Also with an online request form, rules can be established to insure that each request is filled in completely and accurately. Blackout dates, customizable required fields, and preset drop down lists keep requestors in check when creating requests, eliminating the need for a trip approver or transportation staff to vet each request against their own guidelines. “I require fields such as date, group, budget code, vehicle type, and other pertinent information. This way I do not have to contact the sponsor for information they have forgotten to include,” says Cynthia Black, field trip coordinator for the Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District. “When a sponsor is blocked due to missing a required field, they get a message letting them know exactly what needs to be corrected.”

Yet for all the promise these systems offer, there are many pitfalls as well. Many transportation departments are not prepared for the challenges of meeting the request and approval needs of all the various departments in their district. These challenges arise for two reasons:

1. The transportation department is now managing a workflow process which until now was almost completely hidden from them.
2. Many districts will not settle on a standard approach: different principals may have different criteria or system requirements for the requestors in their school.

Cindy recalls early discussions with administrators at Cypress Fairbanks “When we first met with the principals in our district to discuss our online trip request system, we were surprised by the different curriculum requirements that they needed on the request form. Up until that point, we had no idea.” In addition to needing specific fields for collecting information related to the school, in larger districts different principals may have differing approaches to budget codes: Some require the requestor to supply the budget code, others assign the code themselves (viz. the principal’s secretary), while others wish to have the budget codes linked to each activity in the building so they are automatically assigned when the requestor selects her activity. Having an online system versatile enough to handle these different scenarios can make the difference between success and failure in getting “buy in” from the educational side of the district.

Perhaps the biggest obstacle to the efficient submittal of field trips is the approval process. It’s bad enough that users and approvers are often unclear as to the office their particular request must go to, but the request approval chain as a whole can be so convoluted that sometimes even the transportation departments themselves don’t know exactly which path requests should take.

By carefully mapping out all possible approval chains and building them into an online request solution, the system dictates the flow of any given request. This method has two enormous benefits: First , the request can be guided to all the right people. Principals, superintendents, even school nurses and cafeteria staff can be included in a preset approval chain. Secondly, such an approval process completely eliminates needless decision making. Trip requests can move naturally to the transportation department, through all of the correct administrators, automatically. Robert Galloway of Sodus Central Schools Transportation found that with explicitly defined approval chains, their online request software “really speeds up the approval process because paper requests aren't being shipped around the campus for several signatures.”

Despite the many challenges involved in successfully implementing online trip request software, for those who have done so, the time and money saved has made it well worth the effort. As more school transportation departments face the tough decisions that come with shrinking budgets, these savings are no longer a luxury the basis for operations in the 21st Century.