Clay County transportation reports staffing gains and Chipmunk app rollout, acknowledges early glitches

Clay County’s transportation director reported incremental progress on driver recruitment and described the district’s shift to a single routing and parent‑notification platform at the Jan. 27 workshop.

Director Roxanne Shermonte said about 30% of students use the bus system, the district runs roughly 180 routes daily, and open routes had been reduced from about 35 earlier in the school year to 12 at the time of the presentation. She described active recruitment—trainees entering a five‑week program, staff redeployments and substitutes—to reduce open allocations.

The department explained its move away from a multi‑app model (including Here Comes the Bus) to an integrated Bus Planner + Chipmunk platform to improve route updates and parent notifications. Staff acknowledged early technical problems: delayed push alerts to parents, app version mismatches, and registration synchronization that can mean newly registered students are not visible to parents or drivers until the next day. Transportation outlined fixes and staged rollouts for features including substitutions (allowing drivers to show as active when covering others’ routes) and a dispatch module that will let managers reassign stops and optimize routes centrally.

Parents raised concerns about long hold times when calling transportation during incidents and requested better, rapid self‑service updates. Shermonte urged persistence in contacting staff while citing improvements in staffing and app features; she said the department is monitoring call‑handling and will continue to tune alerts and staffing to reduce delays.

The board praised operational improvements but asked for further work on call routing, communications options (automated route updates), and monitoring of Chipmunk’s rollout. No formal action was taken; Transportation plans follow‑up updates to the board as the dispatch module and substitution features are piloted.