Osceola County families can use an app to track their students on districtwide buses again after it was briefly shut down.
The Here Comes the Bus app is up and running again, after it was temporarily shut off to allow final route assignments to be made for bus drivers, as the district stretched to fill dozens of open positions.
Parents can use the app to track the location of their child’s bus on a map of their school route, and kids can use the app to tell when their bus will arrive in the mornings and afternoons.
The information the app uses is encrypted so that parents only receive information about their child’s route.
The app is available in English, Spanish and French.
The county will open a new transportation facility next week in St. Cloud that will reduce travel times on routes for families who live nearby.
At the beginning of the school year, the Florida Education Association estimated there were nearly 7,000 teacher vacancies across the state, along with 5,000 open support staff positions. Support staff include cafeteria workers, school nurses, teachers aides and bus drivers.
A survey from HopSkipDrive, found a number of different factors are contributing to a nationwide bus driver shortage. Those include issues recruiting and retaining new bus drivers, drivers retiring, low driver pay, losing drivers to the private industry and COVID-19 concerns.
The same survey found solving this shortage, could help alleviate chronic absenteeism and improve educational equity for all students.
