A Pre-historic Paper Beast

How field trip management software has cleaned up the paper trail process for many districts

Stephane Babcock | Associate Editor

On the surface, field trips are a student’s best friend. But behind the scenes, there can be any number of bumps along the way: lost request forms, too many trips scheduled for one day or lack of funds. More and more, school districts are employing some form of management software to make their lives easier and to assure students get to enjoy their little treks off the school campus.

Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District, Houston
With 90,000 students and over 10,000 field trips taken a year, field trip coordinator Cindy Black needed a way to clean up the mess caused by the paper system she used to plan trips for the 74 schools in the district. The process was further complicated by the fact that each bus that was used required a separate form in triplicate.

“It got too hard to manage,” said Black. “We would manually input all the information into an Excel sheet and we would stick papers on the wall for the drivers to pick from.”

For the past two years, Black has been working with EasyBus’ EasyTrip software to turn a once hectic process into one that now takes a quarter of the time it did. The program was molded to fit the needs of the sizable district.

“We write all of our software with the goal of making it as customizable and scalable as possible,” said EasyBus President Mike Hinckley. “No two school districts do field trips in exactly the same way, so our goal from the beginning is to write our software so that each school that installs it feels as though it was written ‘just for them.’”

Teachers sign on to the online system and input all the necessary information into the request form. The decision-makers for a particular school — usually the principal — then receive an e-mail informing them there is a request pending their approval. Once the trip is approved, the information is imported into EasyTrip.

“We look at it, determine the number of buses, make sure all the information is correct and then we put it in the trip selection. We save money on paper and manpower,” said Black.

Austin Independent School District, Texas
In the late 1980s, Austin ISD developed a homegrown mainframe application integrated into the purchasing database that allowed schools to enter their trip requests.

“It was very primitive, very basic,” said Jim Faron, coordinator of transportation planning. “It kept records, but it wasn’t very accessible, and there was hardly any accountability or room for follow up.”

The district dumped the database and now uses Gecko’s Transportation Operations Manager (T.O.M.) to take some of the burden off their backs. Since field trips fall under the same rules as purchase requests, the school bookkeeper must only sign on and the system brings up all the school’s information, such as specific funding numbers.

“It’s pretty seamless. The software allows us to handle large demand with a minimum number of personnel. There is also a separate database for the athletic department, which makes thing a lot less confusing and shows the flexibility of the program,” said Faron.

T.O.M. also simplifies personnel changes. Since the program does not require software installation, a new employee only has to sign on to the system.

Dare County Schools, N.C.
For school districts like David Twiddy’s, field trips have to be balanced with athletic events, which sometimes lead to students missing their expeditions to the local museum so the school’s football team can make its way to a game. Beginning with three of the 11 schools in the district, Twiddy implemented SchoolDude’s TripDirect, a planning and management system that helps streamline the process.

“SchoolDude can give me a bottom figure for the year, the cost per trip, and it keeps me from double booking the buses,” said Twiddy, Dare County’s transportation director. “It can give you charts and graphs of all the data: distances traveled, trips per school and the cost to operate a vehicle per trip.”

Twiddy plans on bringing the rest of the district into the system by this month, which will make communication between himself and the different schools that much smoother for a district where some of the schools are 87 miles apart.

“The biggest area is that our solution maps to the entire process from the teacher’s classroom, to the superintendent who wants to monitor the field trips and their applicability to the educational goals, to the transportation director who needs to line up the bus and the driver, as well as the ripple effect through the district, for example, notifying the food services team to avoid preparation of meals,” said Lee Prevost, SchoolDude’s president and co-founder.

Bedford Central School District, N.Y.
Bedford’s field trip scheduling is in the capable hands of Dee Huntington, the senior office assistant of automated systems. Her job of juggling close to 400 field trips a year with the use of either contracted school buses or motorcoaches has been streamlined by Transfinder’s Field Trip Enterprise software.

“I can look at the whole district’s field trips on my computer,” said Huntington, whose team sets up icons on each school secretary’s computer so they can just click on it, get into the system and start inputting the field trip information. “We limit them to only be able to view their school’s calendar of field trips.”

The status of requests are color coded: yellow is “request submitted;” light blue is “request approved;” green is “transportation approved;” red is “declined;” dark blue means the trip has been completed; and if there’s a white dot, the trip has been canceled.

Huntington is the only staff member who can make changes once the trip has been entered into the system. It also allows her to see more than the schools can, for example, the billing classification for each bus company.

“Transfinder’s software is Web-based and secure, enabling unlimited users to participate in the field trip process,” said Larry Lee Fiber, the company’s vice president. “Plus, it incorporates driving directions and strict account code tracking with corresponding billing components into one comprehensive package.”

East Valley School District #361, Spokane, Wash.
After using a process that would take from one day to several, East Valley now sees its field trip information inputted at the click of a button with TripPlanner from Trapeze.

“The new system works instantaneous, and there’s a lot less confusion,” said Brian Wallace, director of technology.

The technology department didn’t have to go far to find a solution to its field trip dilemmas. Trapeze’s RGIS mapping software was already being utilized by the county, and it could also be used to determine school boundaries.

“TripPlanner uses ESRI ARC Web services for mapping any and all trips without users needing to build and clean up map data,” said Pat O’Connor, a sales assistant at Trapeze.

The new system also timestamps each step of the process so users can see exact times when information has been inputted and when trips have been signed off on.

“Now there’s not only accountability on the secretary but also on the dispatcher,” added Wallace.

Toms River Regional School District, N.J.
Drivers of the 200 district-owned buses of Toms River schools now only have to look at one sheet of paper to see everything they need to know about assigned field trips.

“That one piece of paper gives them everything: starting and ending times, directions, at what school they’re picking up the students, where they’re going,” said Donna Varga, trip supervisor, on TripTracker by Versatrans. “We do more trips now than before because of the program. We’ve had 98 trips in one day before.”

What used to be transferred from log books and direction guides for the 7,000 district field trips and athletic trips is now compiled in one program.

“We understand that each district we come across may have a unique way of performing any of the many aspects that go into scheduling a field trip,” said Joe Hasan, product manager. “TripTracker was developed in such a way that it is flexible for any district to implement and user-friendly enough for our end-users that are extremely busy people, including many that cover several job functions.”