AUSTIN, Texas — The days of your child waiting for a school bus when it's cold, raining, hot, or otherwise inconvenient will soon become a thing of the past.
"I go to many community meetings at the schools, and this was one of the requests. 'Hey, can you make this happen for us so my child doesn't have to wait 30 minutes when it's raining,'" said Kris Hafezizadeh, Austin Independent School District's Director of Transportation
Thanks to AISD's new "Where's the Bus?" app, parents can check the real-time location of their kid's school bus.
The app refreshes every 15 seconds, so you can see exactly how far away it is from your home.
"It will show the bus, and then there's your bus stop, your house," Hafezizadeh said. "It will show here estimated arrival time."
The app is designed for the parents of the roughly 38,000 students that are eligible to ride the district's buses, but AISD says they've taken certain safety precautions to ensure not just anyone can download the app.
"The whole public does not have access to this," said Hafezizadeh. "Every parent that has a student in the district, we have a parent cloud. We made sure our app goes through that parent cloud first."
That parent cloud AISD uses is a secure network only for parents within the district.
The app is set to launch Monday on the first day of school.
"Is it going to be 100 percent perfect? Of course not," said Hafezizadeh. "With any technology, with any new technology I'm sure we're going to get some questions, but we will address them and we will take care of them."
Still, AISD is anticipating gratitude and relief for thousands of parents.