Robbins 'confident' school starts Monday

Aug. 13—When Daviess County Public Schools officially opens Monday, students will have already missed three days of the new academic year.

And at the center of the delay in the start of the school year is Transfinder, an established New York-based bus routing software company, that has contracted with DCPS to streamline the district's bus routes due to the ongoing bus driver shortage.

Antonio Civitella, Transfinder president and CEO, and Matt Robbins, DCPS superintendent, discussed what led to postponing the 2022-23 school year — which was scheduled to start Wednesday, Aug. 10 — during a conference call Friday with the Owensboro Messenger-Inquirer.

"...The school district, and many of our clients at this moment, are undertaking significant changes to the routes because of the driver shortage," Civitella said. "...All of our clients, including Daviess, they are scrambling to make very fast changes, so any little glitches will just add on time."

Although DCPS has been a client of Transfinder for the past four years, this is the first time the school district has implemented the bus routing software.

DCPS gathers its data from parents enrolling their children into the school system's Infinite Campus website, which feeds into Transfinder's software.

According to Robbins, importing data from more than 11,000 students into the new bus routing system became more complicated than expected.

For existing users of Transfinder's software, Robbins said making changes for a new school year isn't as difficult.

But for DCPS, which is in its "implementation phase," there were unforeseen problems that came with importing the data of thousands of students.

"There are some things in life that you don't anticipate happening," Robbins said. "And some of those things are because you're doing things for the first time."

According to its website, Transfinder Corporation was founded in 1988. Transfinder develops routing, scheduling and fleet maintenance solutions for transportation logistics.

Its software is being used by more than 2,000 school districts and municipalities in 47 states. In Kentucky, Transfinder has 28 clients, with Jefferson County Public Schools its largest district.

Civitella said existing school district clients have weeks to months to prepare for a new school year, but because DCPS had to wait until closer to the school starting date to import its data, it became a monumental task to complete in a short amount of time.

"...Our team has been working with their team nonstop to see what is the best way to do this — the minimal impact," Civitella said. "(But) obviously the impact was pretty great. The school (system) had to shut down to finish the work."

DCPS is implementing the software, which comes at an annual cost of $13,150, in an effort to more efficiently use fewer bus drivers to cover larger routes.

DCPS will start the year with 90 full-time drivers, but Robbins said the district could easily benefit from 10 to 20 more.

"We don't have any margin of error; we need every person that we have — and then some — to make it happen as fluidly and as efficiently as possible," he said about the shortage.

The software is also being used to make the transition from door-to-door bus stops to group bus stops.

For now, it will be used to distinguish between the door-to-door pick ups in the morning to what will be group drop-offs at designated bus stops in the afternoon.

Robbins said the plan is to eventually have both mornings and afternoons be group bus stops only.

"We do anticipate going to group pick up (in the mornings), just like we're doing group drop-off in the afternoons; we're just not there yet," Robbins said. "...We'll probably do that over a much more prolonged period of time."

As far as either party taking responsibility for the delay in school starting, Robbins said he's not interested in determining fault.

"I think we all would've liked to have had a better outcome," he said. "As I say here all the time, assigning blame never solved the first problem."

Civitella said his company's priority is ensuring its clients' students aren't forgotten or left on a bus.

"What keeps everybody up at night is to make sure that every kid is picked up and dropped off back home as safe as possible," he said.

Robbins said he has no regrets about delaying the school year and would make the same decision again if it meant knowing every student had a safe trip to and from school.

"...We wish we weren't in the position we found ourselves; we'll deal with the three days, and we'll get back in school on Monday," he said. "I feel very confident about that."

Don Wilkins, dwilkins@messenger-inquirer.com, 270-691-7299