Salt Lake City School District Partners with Zum


Modernizing Utah’s student transportation I


n March of 2024, Ken Martinez, Transportation Manager at Salt Lake City School District (SLCSD), put out an RFP for a new transportation technology provider. For years, SLCSD, made up of 36 schools and serving over 20,000 students, had operated using paper route sheets and a patchwork of various vendors. Some of those vendors handled routing, some of them field trips, and others GPS. The result? A tangle of systems none of which meshed together. “My team would spend hours trying to locate a single


student,” Martinez said. “We had lags in our GPS, so we couldn’t reliably tell parents where buses were. We were using paper route sheets, and none of our technology was connected. That’s just not good enough.” It was time to upgrade. Martinez, a student transpor- tation veteran, put out a request for a new technology partner. “We needed three things,” he recalled. “First, an all-in-one technology platform that could bring SLCSD up to the modern age. Second, an improvement on the features and services we already had, like increased tracking of our students. And third, a partner that under- stood how to work with EV buses. We’ve just deployed twelve of them—and that’s the future of student transportation.”


In April, Martinez awarded the contract to Zūm Services Inc., the leader in modern student transportation.


1: An All-in-One Technology Platform In his RFP, Martinez asked for a partner that could


cover all of SLCSD’s technological needs. First, that meant evolving from outdated paper route sheets. “It used to be that we would print route sheets and hand them to our drivers,” Martinez noted. “It’s a lot to ask of a driver—to try and follow a piece of paper while driving a big yellow school bus. That needed to change— and fast.” By implementing Zūm’s technology, SLCSD was able to eliminate paper route sheets and replace them with cutting-edge, GPS-enabled tablets. Now all drivers navi- gate much more safely and efficiently. Second, Martinez wanted an all-in-one technolo-


gy platform—not a piecemeal solution from the past. Managing different vendors, each offering a different piece of the puzzle, was simply too time consuming, and ultimately ineffective. “It’s one thing if I’m using A for tracking, B for field trips, and C for GPS,” Martinez said. “But if A can’t talk to B, and B can’t talk to C, we have a problem. It’s the modern era. We should be able to get all of these systems talking to each other.” Zūm’s cutting-edge technology covers all student transportation needs in a single integrated platform. “We’ve spent a lot of time listening to parents and fami- lies, school and district administrators, and school


12 School Transportation News • OCTOBER 2024


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