Disclosure: NYC Dads Group received compensation from Here Comes the Bus for this post. The quotes from our City Dads Group parents are genuine.

Many NYC moms and dads in November experienced one of a parents’ greatest fears: they couldn’t locate their children.

An early-season snowstorm paralyzed afternoon traffic, leaving students taking school buses home stranded on the road for hours and making parents frantic. This was especially upsetting to those with special needs students or little ones without cell phones.

As a result, the New York City Council in January approved several measures related to improving school bus services. A key piece of this legislation requires the installation of GPS systems on all 10,000 city school buses by September. This, in part, would allow parents and guardians to track their children’s bus location in real time.

This new technology for parents excites James Lopez, a Staten Island father of two. “Thank goodness I won’t have to worry if my child’s bus came or not. No more standing in the rain or catching frostbite for no reason,” said Lopez, a co-organizer for NYC Dads Group.

Such computer or app-based GPS-linked systems are already in place in several urban U.S. school systems, such as Atlanta and Indianapolis.

A majority of NYC school buses already have GPS technology installed, but the city is still deciding on a vendor to provide the bus tracking mobile app to parents.

Contender to link school bus GPS to NYC parents

A leading contender that says it can easily make the September deadline is “Here Comes the Bus,” a software tracking system already used in hundreds of U.S. schools district including the cities of San Antonio, Texas, and Charlotte, N.C. 

Once purchased and installed by a district to work with its school bus fleet, parents can download the free Here Comes the Bus app to smartphones, tablets or computers.

Additionally, Here Comes the Bus offers a feature known as Student Ridership. It lets parents individually track their children from the time they get on the bus to exactly where and when they exit the bus. The system works via a scanner barcode or radio frequency identification chip on a student’s ID card.

This data would also give parents, and school and busing officials information on a child’s whereabouts if a student accidentally got on the wrong bus or off at the wrong stop.

The Here Comes the Bus app tracks their child’s bus along its route so they know exactly when to be at the stop for drop off or pick up. It even let users set up alerts so they are notified when the bus gets within a certain distance of the child’s stop.

In Charlotte, N.C., where the public school system is in its second year of using Here Comes the Bus, the app has become a must every day classes are in session for the children of Darrell Humphrey, an organizer of our Charlotte Dads Group and father of three.

“Here Comes the Bus helps us with time management in the morning and being able to get the kids to the stop in time,” he said. “My son, Ethan, asks me every morning, ‘Dad, where’s the bus at?’ It also helps me, as the parent who’s home in afternoon, to know when he’s on the bus and heading home. I would highly recommend this app to other parents.”

With all the concerns about privacy these days, Here Comes the Bus encrypts every student’s data. Only an authorized user with the proper ID and password can access it. Parents are only able to see their student’s information and no one else’s.

Here Comes the Bus, from Indianapolis-based Synovia Solutions, has more than 1 million users and overall positive reviews, including a positive 4.6 out of 5 stars rating in the Apple iTunes store.

Photo by Jannis Lucas on Unsplash

To Whom It May Concern At My Son’s Middle School:

If you do not find my son’s name on your sixth-grade class list, it’s not for lack of trying. I attempted to register him at least two and a half times. And in two languages.

When the forms arrived in our mail this spring, I diligently verified the home address and phone numbers printed on them as instructed. They were correct. According to the phone book. That’s where I needed to check since I received the forms for someone else’s boy at a different school.

In all fairness, the school also sent me a form with the right information for my son. It was in Spanish. But that’s why we have Google Translate.

In May, I brought the requisite multiple forms of proof of residency and my sworn allegiance to the Common Core Standards to school registration day. However, I was turned away because I didn’t have his doctor-approved physical exam and immunization records yet.

“But the insurance company wouldn’t let me schedule his checkup until August,” I told the school nurse, who quickly gave me a copy of August dates when I could register him at city hall. Only two dates listed weren’t when our family was on vacation.

Months passed. The physical came and went well, outside of the pediatrician’s reminder to my son that “you don’t have to like vegetables, you just have to eat them.” On the appointed day I drove to city hall with his medical records, bilingual contact form and necessary DNA cheek swabs.

But not my driver’s license. I realized this halfway there.

After a vaguely legal U-turn and another 20 minutes, I arrived at a school registration traffic jam inside the government center lobby. It contained one set of frustrated people waiting to register their incoming kindergartners and a second, unaffiliated set of frustrated people wanting to get upstairs to testify before the zoning board against a local development plan. The air felt thick with enough negative energy to resurrect the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man from “Ghostbusters.”

At risk of strangulation from those vacantly staring parents waiting for the number on their index cards to be called, I sidled up to a table and asked what I should do.

“Oh, middle school? Just give me your child’s medical information and someone will call you tomorrow,” the worker said.

“You don’t need my driver’s license? Property tax bill? I can quickly acquire blood samples, too.”

Nope, just the medical forms, she said.

I left, confused but relieved. A day passed, and then most of another before my cell phone rang.

Could I bring all the necessary ID forms to city hall tomorrow? “But we’re leaving for vacation early tomorrow. We’re not back until the day before school starts,” I said.

After nixing other options (“No, my wife can’t bring them. She is going on vacation with us, too. So is our dog.”), the official said my sister could submit the paperwork provided she brought a copy of my driver’s license. I felt confident about this because my sister is reliable. She also took enough college Spanish to translate my son’s forms.

Not to my surprise, while partaking in a late afternoon gimlet upon the beach house deck, my sister called my cell phone to say the person she turned the school registration forms into now couldn’t find any of my son’s medical information. At least the burning acid sensation rising up my gullet had a nice limey edge.

So, dear middle school officials, that’s why my son may not be on your list. However, if you don’t find him on the premises at all, he probably just took the wrong bus and instead ended up at one of the local high schools. His sister already set that precedent a few years ago.

A version of this first appeared on Always Home and Uncool.