OSCEOLA COUNTY, Fla. — After years of frustration with the Here Comes the Bus app, Osceola County parents are cautiously optimistic about a new system aimed at improving student safety.
“With the Here Comes the Bus app, I first found out about it, and I thought, this is going to be great — but it wasn’t,” said parent Gaia Ivanov. Her seven-year-old son goes to Harmony Community Elementary. “For the entire first year we tried using it, it just didn’t work,” she said.
Ivanov continues, “Last year it got a little bit better than the years before, but even then, it still wouldn’t read us for when he was actually signing in... for when the bus was actually supposed to be here.”
Those concerns aren’t lost on Osceola County Superintendent Mark Shanoff. “We knew that the bus software we were using, and that parents were using to track their students’ whereabouts, wasn’t always reliable,” said Shanoff. “In fact, it was very frustrating.”
Now, the district is switching from the old app to ReaXium to a new system designed to provide real-time, accurate tracking of school buses and students. “Anytime we have a student that may be missing with this system, we’ll be able to time-stamp exactly what bus they got on, when they got on it, and the location of that bus at any given time,” Shanoff explained.
Shanoff also mentions that the app uses a badge system where students scan on and off the bus. “The badge scanning will really help in ensuring that, first, we know the last point of contact,” he said.
Parents can access ReaXium through the new portal: Parent Square.
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