Marietta mulls school bus tracker for parents

Marietta might ruin a lot of excuses by children to parents.

“Oh, um, well ... the bus broke down! That’s why I was late ... My chocolate mouth? Yeah, I can explain that. The bus repair person felt sorry for us so he gave everyone chocolate for the inconvenience.”

Nice try, kid. Marietta City Schools board of education mem- bers are set to vote on a new transportation management software that would include a bus tracker for parents.

To acquire and install the software would cost $34,341 in E-SPLOST — Education Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax — funds to Tyler Technologies, according to the agenda for the Tuesday work session.

The company has an office in Duluth but has locations across the country.

Erick Hofstetter, assistant superintendent of operations for MCS, said the software would be called Traversa and was released in November 2017.

The software routes buses, tracks work orders, sched

ules fleet maintenance and also records GPS data.

And with that latter comes bus tracking for parents via the “Parent App” that allows parents to get notifications on their phone of the status of their child’s bus, including if it’s running late or early in addition to the live location.

Hofstetter said they are considering others, but this software is going to be the staff ’s recommendation.

He said DeKalb and Paulding county schools have also

purchased the new Traversa software, but he is unsure if they plan on using the tracking function. The Cherokee County school district uses a bus tracker for some of its schools.

At about 9,000 students, Marietta is a much smaller school district than all of those.

The MCS board is slated to vote at its Tuesday meeting, which starts at 7 p.m. at the administrative building, 250 Howard St.