HopSkipDrive heralds same-day ride availability amidst national school bus driver shortage

To address schools’ current operational and funding challenges, technology company HopSkipDrive announced new initiatives and options for supplemental transportation designed to ensure students reliably and consistently attend school on time.

As a national school bus driver shortage continues this back-to-school season, school districts working to avoid late or no-show buses are partnering with HopSkipDrive to meet the needs of students and families, ensuring students can get to school safely, reliably, and ready to learn.

The company is meeting school district needs in numerous ways:

• Accelerated Turnaround Times: HopSkipDrive has long led the student transportation industry in the shortest turnaround times for a confirmed ride by enabling district officials to book a ride for a student with just hours’ notice through HopSkipDrive’s leading ride management platform, RideIQ. This is in stark contrast to the norm in student transportation, in which it often takes days or even weeks to find a driver and arrange transportation for a student, leaving a child at home, stranded without being in the classroom.

In response to district needs, HopSkipDrive has reduced the turnaround time for confirmed rides from eight hours to six hours. Additionally, the HopSkipDrive platform can now arrange same-day rides for students in markets across the country. These changes directly address the needs of districts working to arrange student transportation at the start of the academic year, particularly for highly mobile student populations, such as students experiencing homelessness or in foster care, as well as new public school enrollees, who may require transportation on short notice.

In many cases, these students are identified by school officials and require transportation from new places outside of a school bus route with very little notice. Having safe, reliable, and immediate transportation is a lifeline for these students and their learning outcomes.

• Highest-ever availability of vetted drivers: HopSkipDrive has increased the number of highly vetted CareDrivers in its network and is proud to have the highest-ever availability of drivers at back-to-school. This increased driver availability comes at a critical time for school districts, 91 percent of which report experiencing bus driver shortages. CareDrivers are parents, grandparents, babysitters, and nurses from the local community who have completed HopSkipDrive’s 15-point certification process including fingerprint-based background checks, driving history checks, vehicle inspections, and video screenings.

Earlier this year, HopSkipDrive announced that throughout the 2023-2024 academic year, the community of active CareDrivers doubled.

• Exceptional client satisfaction: With years of experience and high-performance teams across engineering, client experience, product, data science, and operations, HopSkipDrive is welcoming the new school year by setting a new standard for client satisfaction, driven by the HopSkipDrive team's deep experience, expertise, and ongoing technological innovation.

“Some of our parent pick up areas are not easy to find when you only have the school address,” said the general secretary for transportation at Washington’s Fife School District. “[With HopSkipDrive], the driver can arrive at the parent pick up areas of the school and not mess up the buses. This is great!! Thank you.”

Additional client feedback includes:

• “I like everything about your service. The promptness of routes being routed, tracking of students, driver information, how accessible and easy to maneuver the system,"
• "The quick response time that I receive from the staff to take care of my questions and concerns,” and
• “Great service. Extremely easy to use, great customer service, and super reliable.”

In addition to operational excellence, including average customer service wait times under 90 seconds and guaranteeing that 100 percent of school district ride requests are matched with a CareDriver, this year, HopSkipDrive launched three new products to further enhance its services and enable smoother onsite operations.

• Daily Queue, which allows school staff to efficiently manage rides and communicate directly with CareDrivers,
• Direct and secure contact between school transportation teams and HopSkipDrive CareDrivers, and
• An in-app digital ID for CareDrivers.

HopSkipDrive's cutting-edge technology continues to raise the bar for school transportation.

“Educators, teachers, and school staff nimbly and compassionately support the growing number of students needing individualized transportation needs – and we often see clients booking rides the night before so a student doesn’t miss a day of school,” said Joanna McFarland, CEO and co-founder of HopSkipDrive. “We’ll continue to empower transportation officials navigating challenges like a bus driver shortage to quickly support students who need a ride.”

Here’s how HopSkipDrive works:

• School districts identify students to receive rides from CareDrivers and inform parents and caregivers.
• Transportation officials will then arrange rides directly through HopSkipDrive’s online platform.
• Once a ride has been booked, HopSkipDrive delivers ride details to organizers, parents, and caregivers. All details, and real-time ride tracking, are available in the HopSkipDrive app.
• Riders and CareDrivers verify one another using a multi-factor authentication system using birthdays, names, and code words, for an added layer of security before beginning the ride.
• Parents and caregivers of selected students will receive updates, including pickup times, live ride tracking, and CareDriver information, via text message and through the HopSkipDrive app.

About HopSkipDrive

HopSkipDrive is a technology company that solves complex transportation challenges where there is a heightened need for safety, equity, and care. HopSkipDrive is modernizing the $30 billion school transportation industry in two ways: HopSkipDrive’s marketplace arranges care-centered transportation to supplement school buses and existing transportation options by connecting kids to highly-vetted caregivers on wheels, such as grandparents, babysitters, and nurses. HopSkipDrive also builds software and offers advisory services that solve the biggest transportation challenges facing schools and school districts around the country, including budget cuts, bus driver shortages, and reaching climate goals. HopSkipDrive currently partners with school districts across 13 states, supporting more than 10,000 schools. More than three million rides over 61 million miles have been completed through HopSkipDrive since the company was founded in 2014 by three working mothers.

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