Denver Public Schools Is Using RouteWise™ AI to Efficiently Manage Bell Time Changes
Overview
Denver Public Schools (DPS) is the largest school district in Colorado with 90,000 students, 30,000 of whom are transportation-eligible. The Denver Public Schools transportation team has proactively taken on strategies to address the ongoing bus driver shortage. However, budget constraints and the desire to continue to optimize the transportation system led the district to seek out a tool to help them efficiently respond to new changes in real time.
The Situation
DPS implemented a large-scale bell time change to start the 2023–2024 school year. Many schools wanted to modify their new bell times to better meet their teachers’ and families’ schedules.
Before making these bell time changes, the DPS transportation team wanted a tool that would clearly identify the operational impact of any new bell time changes. Because of the bus driver shortage, the DPS transportation team also knew that they couldn’t make changes that would add additional routes.
Bell Time Changes
While DPS completed a district-wide bell time change at the start of the 2023–2024 school year, 23 schools were interested in further modifying their bell times for 2024–2025. Within the complexities of a school transportation system, bell times cannot be considered in isolation, as one school’s bell times can impact efficiency for the next school.
DPS looked to RouteWise AI, HopSkipDrive’s revolutionary technology offering for student transportation planning, which can help school districts analyze the impacts of various constraints including bell time changes, and provide comprehensive routing solutions using a variety of transportation methods.
Thanks to the power of RouteWise AI, HopSkipDrive ran 173 models to analyze different permutations of bell time changes for DPS, accounting for the operational impacts of different change combinations. With these insights, DPS confidently accepted changes for 11 of the 23 schools with a full understanding of the operational impacts. DPS was also able to propose alternate bell times for schools where the initial request was not feasible. In less than three weeks, RouteWise AI enabled DPS to assess the request, and finalize and communicate decisions.
“Ultimately what I need to be able to communicate back to a school leader or a Board member is whether a bell time change will require more drivers or not. That seemingly simple question is really complex. RouteWise AI helps our team by delivering a clean understanding of how a change would impact operations. This is an analysis that might traditionally take our team nights and weekends to put together and now I can request a new RouteWise AI scenario and get the results the next morning. We got answers to our school communities and made smart bell time changes faster, saving time and money with RouteWise AI’s support.”
—Tyler Maybee, Director of Operations,
DPS Transportation
Results:
DPS approved 11 bell time changes in less than three weeks with a confident understanding of operational impact
Supported local school needs without degrading operational efficiency
Reduced time investment from transportation staff involved in the process
How RouteWise AI Approached the Problem(s)
The first thing HopSkipDrive did in working with Denver Public Schools was to use RouteWise AI to develop a personalized routing model that takes into account all of the district’s routing parameters and constraints. Then, HopSkipDrive seamlessly loaded DPS’s current route plans as a baseline for optimization analysis.
Once the model and baseline data were in place, Denver Public Schools was ready to take advantage of RouteWise AI and the power of AI.
Conclusion
In less than three weeks, with the insights and analytical recommendations of RouteWise AI, DPS was able to approve 11 school bell time changes, meeting school requests for change and avoiding the addition of any new bus routes.
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