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Mill Creek board approves Transfinder integrations after first-week bus problems
Summary
The Mill Creek Township School District approved two Transfinder add-ons — GPS Connect ($3,350) and Viewfinder ($6,750) — to give district staff direct access to bus GPS data and trip reports after widespread first-week delays tied to a driver shortage and spotty GPS feeds from the contractor, First Student.
The Mill Creek Township School District board voted to purchase two Transfinder integrations — GPS Connect for $3,350 and Viewfinder for $6,750 — intended to give district staff direct, searchable access to real-time and historical bus GPS data.
District finance staff and transportation officials said the tools will help the district measure bus arrival times, manage field-trip and extracurricular dispatching, and produce reports needed to hold the contractor, First Student, to the district’s contract standards.
“We're gonna be able to identify to the second how late a bus is from the stops that it is supposed to be at,” said Aaron O’Toole, the district finance/operations presenter. He described GPS Connect as software that pulls First Student’s vehicle GPS feed into Transfinder so the district can run reports and compare actual bus timing to contractual obligations.
Transportation director Robert Murdoch told the board the district is operating 67 routes but remains short roughly 10 drivers, a shortage that helped produce longer rides and stop consolidations this fall. “We currently have 67 routes… and we're currently 10 drivers short,” Murdoch said, explaining why the district wants immediate, direct access to GPS and trip data.
Board members asked whether First Student could simply grant admin access to its Zonar GPS interface; staff said they had asked and not received a reliable answer, and that owning the Transfinder modules would keep data in one place for administrators and principals. The Viewfinder tool, the district said, gives principals and office staff a user-friendly interface to find buses during field trips and to generate trip summaries instead of waiting for the contractor to supply them.
The two purchases were approved in separate roll-call votes at the committee-of-the-whole and board meeting. GPS Connect was approved unanimously in the recorded roll call; Viewfinder carried with one board member voting no (Mister Lindner), who expressed concern about buying a second interface if First Student could provide admin access to its existing GPS system.
District staff described other short-term remedies: First Student is bringing drivers through classroom and behind-the-wheel training (which can take about four weeks), the contractor plans to relaunch a new GPS software, and the district is exploring temporary van services to reduce long routes until new drivers are in place.
The board discussion made a clear distinction between measures aimed at contractor accountability and the longer-term policy choices about how much routing responsibility the district itself should exercise. Several board members said they want the new data to answer enrollment- and routing-impact questions (for example, “if we move this boundary two blocks, what happens to enrollment at that building?”).
The purchases will be invoiced from the general fund and staff said the Viewfinder/GPS Connect expenditures are intended to reduce uncertainty in daily operations and improve communication with parents and building administrators.
Votes and approvals: GPS Connect (motion approved, roll call majority: all recorded yes). Viewfinder (motion approved, roll call: Yes — Dean, Philbeck, Kobilka, Newsome, Pascual, Winchell, Winchell, Brink; No — Lindner).
