The Fannin County School System will now offer technology that will allow parents and students to know when the bus is close to their usual bus stop in the mornings and afternoons.
The program, called Here Comes the Bus, is free to use via their website or app and enables the user to see the location of their school bus on a smart phone, tablet or personal computer.
“It’s a very useful tool in our arsenal for transporting children,” Transportation Director Denver Foster said. “A lot of metro districts are using this with great success, and I hope that we share in that success here.”
How does it work? The program uses global positioning system (GPS) technology to locate and track each school bus.
“It’s a really neat app that will allow parents to set a geo-fence, if you will, around their house at certain distance, and as a school bus enters that geo-fence, it will send them a text alerting them that the school bus is close to their residence,” Foster said. “This will work for morning pick-ups as well as afternoons, so parents will be advised where their child is.”
Denver also explained that the program will be useful in instances where a school bus may be late one day.
The school system will provide bus riders with more information regarding the program as soon as it is available.
“This is actually the first phase of what we’ll be rolling out,” Foster said. “We should be ready to roll this out, hopefully on the first day of school.”