Coming out of spring break, all parents of bus-riding students across Moorhead Area Public Schools have access to a new mobile app that provides up-to-the-minute information on their student’s bus. The MAPS Transportation Office worked closely with each school and other departments to roll out the Edulog Parent Portal district-wide in just four weeks.
“Bringing the Parent Portal to our bus-riding families was really a team effort,” explained MAPS transportation director Sean Schneider. “We were able to work with the Communications Office here at the Operations Center to develop ready-made information for the schools to distribute. We meet with each school’s leadership team to explain the app and give them the information to send to families. We also were able to train every administrative assistant in the entire district on the app and troubleshooting tips during a recent professional development day.”
The Parent Portal was rolled out in phases, starting with S.G. Reinertsen Elementary in mid-February and culminating in the release to Horizon Middle School on Tuesday. This phased deployment allowed the Transportation team to collect feedback from both school office staff and the parents of bus riders before moving on to the next school.
“We were excited to be one of the first schools to launch the Parent Portal,” said Nancy Wilson, principal of Dorothy Dodds Elementary, the second MAPS school to introduce the app. “The collaboration with the Transportation Office made implementation super easy for Dodds’ front office and our families found the provided documents very helpful.”
Originally, Schneider anticipated that the phased launch might run through the long Easter weekend in late April, but the schools’ communication with their bus-riding families yielded overwhelmingly positive feedback, cutting the timeline in half.
“We’re very pleased with how smoothly our schools have introduced the Parent Portal,” added Schneider. “We’d heard stories from other districts about rocky rollouts but our plan put clear information in front of our families and gave our schools the tools they needed to help if necessary—making this process much easier than anticipated.”
As for the app itself, Schneider says that the feedback received indicates that families have found the Parent Portal helpful and easy to use. Schneider attended parent-teacher conferences in early March to hear direct feedback from parents.
“The app is very slick,” said Wilson.
The Edulog Parent Portal is now available for families to download—from both the App Store and Google Play—and receive live updates between 5:30 a.m. and 5:30 p.m. on their students’ buses.