Millions of parents across the US take for granted that every morning their children are being picked up by their town’s own school transportation – a good old-fashioned yellow school bus. I’m one of those lucky people. For me, the bus stops every single day in front of our home and waits for my kids to get on or off.
When GoKid moved its operation this summer to Detroit, Michigan to take part in a three-month “crash course” on accelerating our company through Techstars Mobility, I met with hundreds of mentors – many of them parents themselves. I presented our carpooling technology to them, with a focus on helping parents share the rides with their trusted network of friends. As I did this I often heard, “This would be amazing – our school doesn’t have a school bus.” As many started introducing me to schools, I soon realized that this is a much bigger problem for parents in this city than I had thought. There are simply not many school buses.
While I knew this was the case for most of the 30,000+ private and 6,000+ charter schools in the US I never realized that this was also the case for public schools. On average, it costs $692 for each student in the US to be transported on a bus annually. Many public schools across the nation cannot afford or need to cut down on the cost of running school buses.
How does this affect the schools and their parents?
Yesterday I met with the president of a private catholic school, Detroit Cristo Rey. The school has a combined vocational training that serves around 300 kids from underprivileged families with an excellent curriculum and stellar results.
The school is located in southwest Detroit, in an area called Mexican Town. About half of the school population is from this neighborhood (which itself stretches about 5 miles) – all others come from the larger Detroit area of about 143 square miles. The school only runs two vans that bring 40 kids to school each morning. All the other kids rely on their parents to drive them to school; at least 50% of those parents have difficulty with this as the school day starts at 7:30 am and ends at 4:00 pm.
When I met with the school’s president, Mike Khoury he said, “We could attract more parents to enroll if we had a solution to our pressing transportation needs.” The school has the capacity to enroll 400 kids, but many parents simply don’t have the time to drive their kids to and from school on a daily basis.
How can GoKid help?
GoKid is a mobile-first technology that helps parents schedule and manage carpools with other parents. We can help the school to address the parents and guide them in setting up carpool schedules. If four parents from the same neighborhood came together to share the drives, each family would only need to drive 1.25 times a week – a much more manageable amount of time to spend in a car.
GoKid is currently underway to launch a pilot with the Detroit Cristo Rey school – making our technology available to all parents for free. We will measure and analyze the data retrieved from this pilot and hope to use it to help more of Detroit’s schools drive the productivity and mobility of their families. Stay tuned.
