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School transport, in plain English
What the words mean, and how each works in practice.
AbsenceAdmission numberBus attendantBus cardETA (estimated time of arrival)GuardianMappingPickup and drop-offPrepaid creditReadinessRouteRunSchool closureSetup workbookStopTimetable
Absence
A day a child is not riding the bus.
A parent tells the school a child is not riding, for one day or a range of days. The child is not put on the bus for those days, the driver does not wait, and the day is not charged for.
See: Absence reporting
Admission number
A school's own ID for a child.
When a school gives each child an admission or roll number, imports match on it, which makes every later import safe. Children with no admission number are reported where the school uses them.
Bus attendant
The second adult on a school bus, besides the driver.
Many school buses carry an attendant who helps young children on and off. In The School Bus Tracker each bus can record its attendant, and families can see who that is.
Bus card
A printable card with a child's photo and the code the driver scans.
A family can have their child's bus card emailed to them from the family's screen. It carries the child's photo and a code the driver can scan.
ETA (estimated time of arrival)
How long until the bus reaches a stop.
While a run is under way, families see how many stops away the bus is and an estimate of the minutes until it reaches their stop, as well as how late it is running when it is.
Guardian
An adult, besides a parent, who can see a child's bus.
A child can have more than one adult looking after them. A parent can see the other adults who have access to their children and remove them.
Mapping
Putting a child on a route at a stop, for pickup, drop-off or both.
Mapping is what connects a child to a bus. A child can be mapped for the morning, the afternoon or both, and can be dropped at a different stop from the one they were picked up at. Until a child is mapped, their family cannot see a bus at all.
Pickup and drop-off
A child getting on the bus, and getting off it.
Both are recorded on the bus and each is sent to the child's family as it happens. Together they answer the two questions a parent has on a school day: did my child get on, and did they get off where they should?
Prepaid credit
What the service runs on: credit used per child per day riding.
Credit is bought in plans and used for each child for each day they are booked to ride. A child marked as not riding is not charged for that day. Who pays, the school or the parents or the school first, is set per school.
Readiness
Whether everything is in place for the buses to run.
The readiness screen lists what is still missing before a school's buses can run, such as a run with no driver or a child mapped to a bus with no time on today's run, and links to the screen that fixes each one.
Route
The stops a bus visits, in order, and the roads between them.
In The School Bus Tracker, a route is an ordered list of stops with the way the bus drives between them. Morning and afternoon are usually two separate routes, often calling at the same stops in the opposite order. Where the map offers more than one way between two stops, the school chooses the one the bus really takes.
Run
One journey of one bus along a route, on one day.
A run is what a driver starts and ends. It is made from a timetable on each day the timetable applies, and it carries the bus, the driver, the stops with their times, and the children booked onto it. Live tracking happens only while a run is under way.
School closure
A day the school is shut, so no bus runs.
Closed days, such as holidays, can be added for a whole term at once. Buses are not booked on those days and families see that there will be no bus.
Setup workbook
One spreadsheet with a sheet for each list a school imports.
The setup workbook has sheets for stops, routes, drivers, buses, students and mappings, in the order they have to be imported. A school fills it in and the panel shows what each sheet would do before it does any of it.
Stop
A place a bus picks children up or drops them off.
Each school keeps its own list of stops, with an address and a position on the map. A stop can be a shared corner or a single child's front door. The position is what decides when the bus is arriving.
Timetable
When a route's runs happen, and how often.
A timetable gives a route a start time, the typical time between stops and the days it repeats. Each day's run follows it. A timetable that could not put a bus on the road, for example because no driver is set, is reported when it is saved.
See: School bus route planning, Readiness checks and reports
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