Change in CISD bus pass distribution

New system allows for better tracking of riders

Buses are parked behind the Coppell ISD Service Center on Friday. With the new school year, Coppell ISD has developed a new procedure for distributing bus passes to students as well as an updated bus tracking system to ensure safe transportation with newly formatted bus passes. Photo by Shreya Ravi.

Shreya Ravi

Buses are parked behind the Coppell ISD Service Center on Friday. With the new school year, Coppell ISD has developed a new procedure for distributing bus passes to students as well as an updated bus tracking system to ensure safe transportation with newly formatted bus passes. Photo by Shreya Ravi.

Aliza Abidi, Staff writer

With the new 2022-23 school year, Coppell ISD has developed a replacement procedure for distributing bus passes to students and improved its bus tracking system to ensure safe transportation with newly formatted bus passes.

The passes were planned to be distributed to riders on Sept. 6, but due to problems in routes and an increase in requests, Durham Bus Services announced a delay and will update CISD soon. Hence, currently riding the buses does not require a pass. 

Once available, bus passes will be distributed in class Therefore, parents and students were not asked to retrieve a bus pass from the CISD Service Center prior to the first day of school. 

“Before COVID-19, everyone had to go to the service center and it was haphazard,” CISD director of communications Amanda Simpson said. “Children had to get pictures and for safety reasons, people could not enter without an appointment. Last year, they tried to distribute passes mobile throughout school and people were waiting for hours. We wanted to make it more convenient for families as we also get a large influx of requests between the first day of school and Labor Day.”

The new bus passes will not have photo identification but instead will be scannable, making tracking students on buses and access to passes easier. Not only does this reduce the trouble of students having to take separate photos for their passes, but the scannable feature allows the bus driver to scan the pass as a form of identification and attendance. 

This will be shown to parents through the Durham Bus service app as they will now be able to tell when exactly their child boarded the bus. This application will advance safety in CISD transportation and keep a digital record of where students are during their transportation to and from school.

“The change in bus passes was so we could make sure students get on the proper bus,” Durham Bus Services operation manager Joe Belmarez said. “It’s a growing system and now parents can log on and make sure [the student] got on that bus, whether or not [the student] got off at the right stop, at the right location, [or] going to the right school.

This year, CISD faced technical difficulties which led to the delay in distribution; in the future, riders will receive their passes around the first week of school.

In previous years, new students to CISD faced trouble getting passes after the first day of school.

“Last year I joined CISD a little late in the school year and even though I paid for my bus pass I did not receive one,” Coppell High School junior Nitya Gade said. “It made riding on the bus difficult as often, I was not allowed in even though I qualified.” 

Without the need for a photo, the production of passes this year will be more efficient for both students and CISD. 

The scannability feature of the passes is expected to increase efficiency by solving the problem of too many students riding on one bus. The scanning process ensures that students are only riding the bus they are assigned to.

In addition, with the new construction on many bus routes and the nearly 3,000 students who have requested bus transportation services since the start of school, timings of pickups have been slightly altered throughout the three-tier system (buses going from elementary schools to middle schools to high schools). This has caused a recurring pattern in some late buses across CISD but is being worked on by CISD transportation.

 

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