Clay transportation director reports staffing gains and Chipmunk app rollout; parents report delayed alerts

Roxanne Shermonte, Clay County's new transportation director, reported at the Jan. 27 workshop that the district runs about 180 bus routes daily and that about 30% of students use bus service. She said staffing shortages remain but that recruitment and training are making progress: 19 open driver allocations were reported and several trainees are in process toward obtaining CDLs.

Shermonte described a district switch from "Here Comes the Bus" to the BusPlanner/Chipmunk platform to centralize routing, driver tablets and parent push notifications. She said the integrated platform will permit more precise, bus-stop-level alerts and enable substitutions and a dispatch module that will handle double-up or split routes without losing parent visibility.

Shermonte and other staff acknowledged early rollout problems: some parents experienced long delays in receiving push notifications during internal testing, and incorrectly geocoded stops caused students to appear and disappear on driver tablets. Shermonte said the vendor has been engaged to fix notification lags and that a dispatch module and refinements to stop coordinates are scheduled for the coming weeks.

Parents in the room said phone hold times to reach transportation have been long during some incidents; Shermonte asked those callers to try the district phone again and said she is reviewing staffing and phone routing. She also said Chipmunk's substitution and upcoming dispatch features should improve real-time visibility for parents and district dispatchers.

What happens next: transportation staff will continue training, refine stop coordinates, monitor Chipmunk push-notification performance and provide periodic updates to the board as the app functions are validated.