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Harris County cites early problems after switch to new routing software; district working to fix app and tablet provisioning
Summary
Business services staff told the board the new EasyRouting system and parent app produced routing omissions and tablet provisioning problems at the start of the year; most issues were addressed and the district is coordinating fixes with the vendor.
Harris County — School district transportation officials reported early‑year problems after switching to a new routing and parent‑notification platform, telling the Harris County Board of Education some families were not routed and several tablets issued to parents lacked cellular provisioning.
"A lot of the issues in our routing for our students wasn't so much that we missed them as the new routes that they wanted or new students that needed routing did not complete the forms to get forwarded to us," Mr. Fisher, the district’s business services and technology lead, told the board. He said incomplete online forms or missing signatures prevented routing requests from reaching transportation staff.
Fisher said some routes were missed during the data migration from the old system to EasyRouting; staff worked through a backlog of notifications and at one point received a flood of routing emails that they processed. He also said about 22 of 115 parent tablets did not receive cellular provisioning and therefore could not show real‑time updates until the vendor corrected device activation.
The district’s parent app does not allow continuous live bus tracking for safety reasons, Fisher said. Instead the vendor provides a geofence notification (up to a three‑mile window) that informs parents when a bus enters that zone. "There's just too many safety concerns" to offer continuous real‑time tracking, he said, adding the vendor has a geofence notification and other features.
Fisher said some of the problems were caused or magnified by a vendor‑side outage: "Their whole company‑wide system" crashed after an update, affecting the district's app temporarily. He told board members the vendor offered fixes and the district planned a call with the vendor CEO to review the rollout.
Board members asked whether the district would take steps to avoid similar problems next year; Fisher said staff will document causes and "what can we do to prevent it going forward" once immediate fixes are complete. The district did not record a formal vote on routing software in the transcript; Fisher said EasyRouting was chosen in part because it integrated work that had been duplicated across two older systems and because of lower recurring costs compared with the prior vendor.
The presentation closed with assurances that the bulk of routes had been corrected and fewer parents were reporting problems by the following week.
No formal motion or vote on the routing software was recorded in the meeting transcript.
