Support Students by Keeping Your School Buses Properly Maintained

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Millions of students in the country rely on school buses to take them to and from school every day. Many more take the bus to go on school-sanctioned field trips to get hands-on learning experiences.

Maintaining those buses is an important aspect of supporting your students. When your buses don’t work, parents are upset, and your schools lose their students. But there are actions you and your administration can take to make sure that doesn’t happen.

What’s Involved in Maintaining a Fleet of School Buses?


Keeping your school buses in top condition involves a lot of work on your part. If you don’t have a system in place to track all the moving parts, it can become a chaotic mess quite quickly. Here are some of the most important parts of maintaining your fleets.

When your buses work as expected, parents are happy, students are taken care of, and you continue to receive funding. But if vehicles aren’t maintained properly, it can turn into an administrative nightmare. Parents might start protesting district policies and can make your life much harder. Incorporate these aspects of maintenance into your fleet care schedule and your administrative processes will be much easier.

Vehicle Maintenance


There’s nothing worse than having one of your school buses break down while transporting students. Drivers simply can’t wrangle dozens of kids while trying to troubleshoot vehicle issues.

Creating and sticking to a regular maintenance schedule can work wonders in preventing a slew of vehicle issues. However, you can’t have a reliable schedule if you still use manual tracking processes. Upload all of your vehicle information into an asset tracking database and you can create a rotating schedule for fleet maintenance. That way, you’ll never have a shortage of buses when your drivers and teachers need them.

Mileage Tracking


Your drivers have dedicated routes they must drive each day. When field trips are scheduled, that adds additional mileage your drivers don’t normally have to consider.

Mileage tracking can be made simpler by implementing a GPS tracking system. That way, your drivers don’t have to worry about tracking it manually. This type of tracking is also way less subject to error, since it’s a passive tracking process that runs in the background.

Driver Scheduling


There are several ways to manage your drivers. You can assign them specific routes to stick to every day. Or, you can have them pick from what’s available.

Whatever system you decide to implement, you need a reliable way to schedule your drivers. Create a route management system with easily accessible ways to assign drivers to routes. Consider implementing GPS tracking systems that make it easy for you to see where drivers are at any give time and ensure routes are being fulfilled on a daily basis.

Track All Aspects of Fleet Maintenance in One Place with a Cloud-Based Asset Database


Using cloud-based software to help your fleet tracking has multiple benefits. One of the best benefits is that you don’t have to worry about tracking paperwork. Since your drivers are constantly on the move, it’s much more difficult for them to track paperwork than it is for someone who works in an office environment.

However, with a cloud-based system, they can update it during stops on their routes. They’ll be able to see when their main bus needs to go in for maintenance and can plan for switching to another vehicle. Each driver can take a couple of minutes a day to update the system and report any issues they may have experienced on their drive. As a manager, this’ll give you great insight into potential issues that can escalate into major problems. You can then act on that information immediately instead of waiting for something to break catastrophically.

Asset Panda is a great solution for keeping your tracking needs in an automated database. Keep everything together and coordinate driver schedules with available vehicles.

Want to see how our system can make your school bus fleet tracking easier? Take a free guided tour today!
By:

Bree Brouwer

Bree has held plenty of media- and marketing-related jobs over the years now, like working as a PR and marketing assistant to a Hollywood screenwriting coach, and writing content for three different digital marketing agencies.

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