School transportation teams are balancing budget pressure and rising costs as operational demands increase. Technology and better use of data can help teams coordinate service, spot recurring challenges, and make more informed decisions. When transportation teams have the right tools, the phone rings less and everyone breathes easier.

Join Tim Ammon and Joseph Brumfield to learn how CareEngine, the technology platform that powers every HopSkipDrive ride, coordinates and connects districts, schools, families, riders, CareDrivers, and Safe Ride Support, providing each with the information they need before, during, and after a ride. The webinar will explore what districts can learn from HopSkipDrive’s platform and apply across their own fleets, and how integrated technology supports the day-to-day work of running a transportation department.

The speakers will share practical takeaways for bus fleet operations, including ways to improve communication, use student-specific information, and learn from recurring delays. Attendees will leave with ideas for improving efficiency, evaluating cost-saving opportunities, and better supporting students.

Brought to you by HopSkipDrive

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Presenters:

Tim Ammon
Owner
Ammon Consulting Group

Ammon brings 20+ years of experience advising transportation teams and district leadership, with expertise in routing efficiency and operational performance.

Joseph Brumfield
Vice President of Business Development
HopSkipDrive

Brumfield’s background includes teaching middle school, district leadership roles including Director of Mathematics, 14 years at Pearson in roles including Regional Vice President of Partnerships, and co-founding a K–8 charter school.

The post (Free Webinar) Putting Technology to Work for Your Transportation Department appeared first on School Transportation News.

LOS ANGELES, Calif. —HopSkipDrive, the leader in safe, fast, and simple supplemental student transportation, today highlighted the ongoing work of its Safety Advisory Council (SAC), an independent group of experts who advise the company on the safety of riders, drivers, and clients. Since forming in May 2025, the council has met regularly, most recently at a hands-on, workshop-style session in Denver. That session produced a draft safety framework that sharpens HopSkipDrive policies and is moving into product development.

The council brings together specialists across child passenger safety, road safety, human trafficking prevention, K-12 mental health, and transportation consulting, alongside members with lived experience as crash survivors. Their guidance shapes work ranging from in-vehicle recording and rider verification to how HopSkipDrive supports students with Individualized Education Programs (IEPs), youth in foster care, and students experiencing homelessness.

“HopSkipDrive is built with students’ safety at the center of what we do. Safety is the reason we started the company, and having outside experts in the room has already changed how we build,” said Joanna McFarland, Co-Founder and CEO of HopSkipDrive.”We didn’t get to better rider verification, or the policy ground we’ve gained, without them. Their questions get us there faster than we ever could alone.”

Over a Year of Concrete Progress
Over the past year, HopSkipDrive has moved several council-informed initiatives from concept to practice, including:

● Ride Recording: In-App, part of CareEngine, captures audio and video on every eligible ride, encrypted and available to districts through RideIQ. CareDrivers never see the footage, and the program runs under a formal consent and retention framework.
● A council-informed push to strengthen rider verification beyond the traditional spoken code word, with new ways to confirm the right rider is getting into the right vehicle.
● Continued investment in structured rider and IEP data, replacing open-text notes with consistent, actionable detail so CareDrivers can better support each rider’s needs.
● Policy engagement that helps raise industry-wide screening and accountability standards while preserving specialized safeguards for child transportation, backed by continued monitoring of state and federal legislation that affects how districts get students to school safely.

“We’re in the room while frameworks are still being drafted, and that gives our feedback more weight than a sign-off at the end,” said Steve Nederveld, a former school-district director of mental health services and Safety Advisory Council member. “That’s a different kind of access, and it means the guidance actually lands somewhere.”

“What’s stood out to me this year is how early we were brought in — not after a policy or product is finalized, but while it’s still being shaped. In my work on youth safety and abuse prevention, I’ve seen how much stronger rider verification and behavior-support protocols become when that expertise is part of the conversation from the start. There’s real momentum here, and I’m looking forward to seeing it translate into even more concrete protections for kids. I honestly believe that HopSkipDrive’s thoughtful and comprehensive focus on rider safety should elevate the bar for all ride sharing,” said Shael Norris, Founding Executive Director of SafeBAE and Safety Advisory Council member.

A New Voice on the Safety Advisory Council
HopSkipDrive also welcomed Kyndra Webb of the National Safety Council, who brings expertise in child passenger safety, as the newest member of the Safety Advisory Council.
“My first HopSkipDrive Safety Advisory Council meeting was an engaging and mission-driven conversation focused on one shared goal: ensuring safe, inclusive transportation for every student, including those with specific transportation needs. I valued the collaborative dialogue and the opportunity for every council member to contribute to solutions that put student safety first,” said Webb.

What’s Ahead
Through the rest of the 2026-27 school year, HopSkipDrive and the council are developing a new framework for responding to rider behavior. The goal is that a behavior concern leads to added support rather than a lost ride, keeping students on the platform wherever it is safe to do so. The company is also expanding investment in tools that make it easier for riders who cannot easily advocate for themselves to report a concern.

The council’s role has shifted from advisory to structural. Its input is now built into how HopSkipDrive develops safety policy and product, and that shift will shape the next phase of the company’s safety work.

HopSkipDrive continues to arrange and coordinate rides for students with disabilities, youth in foster care, and students experiencing homelessness under the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act. The company’s safety record across these rides is detailed in its annual Safety Report, and its investment in vetting, technology, and council-informed policy is designed to reduce risk at every stage of the ride.

About HopSkipDrive
HopSkipDrive is the leader in safe, fast, and simple supplemental student transportation. The company is modernizing the $30 billion school transportation industry through two core solutions: a care-centered transportation marketplace and an industry-leading transportation intelligence platform, RouteWise AI. HopSkipDrive’s marketplace supplements school buses and existing transportation options by connecting kids to highly-vetted caregivers on wheels, such as grandparents, babysitters, and nurses in local communities. RouteWise AI helps schools and districts address critical challenges, including budget cuts, bus driver shortages, and reaching climate goals. HopSkipDrive has supported over 14,500 schools across two dozen states, with over 2,000 school districts, government agencies, and nonprofit partners. Millions of rides across 130 million miles have been completed through HopSkipDrive since the company was founded in 2014 by three working mothers.

The post What HopSkipDrive’s Safety Advisory Council Has Helped Build appeared first on School Transportation News.

LOS ANGELES, Calif.— HopSkipDrive, the leader in safe, fast, and simple supplemental student transportation, today debuted CareEngine, the technology platform that powers every HopSkipDrive ride. Purpose built for the complexity of school transportation, CareEngine connects school districts, schools, families, riders, CareDrivers, and HopSkipDrive’s Safe Ride Support team before, during, and after every ride, so everyone gets the information they need at the right time.

Districts today are too often stuck stitching coordination together with disconnected systems that don’t speak to each other, can’t move at the speed students need, and aren’t sustainable over time. When something changes, coordination breaks down exactly when it matters most.

CareEngine was built to close that gap. School transportation is unlike any other transportation, involving far more than a car and a driver moving a rider from one place to another, and every ride is personal: a seven-year-old who depends on a consistent pickup routine, a teenager experiencing homelessness in her third school placement this year, a student who is non-verbal and relies on a familiar greeting. A late pickup can affect a classroom, an outdated handoff instruction can create a safety concern, and a missed update can lead to uncertainty and a chain of phone calls.

When a student’s home address changes at 10:30 at night, CareEngine puts a new plan into motion, and coordinates everyone in real-time. The CareDriver’s route updates automatically in the CareDriver app. RideIQ gives district staff real-time visibility into the change, the school’s Daily Queue shows the day’s updated pickups and dropoffs, the student can follow their own ride through Track My Ride, and the family’s Caregiver app confirms the new pickup, all without a series of phone calls, left messages, or lost sticky notes that plague current processes.

CareEngine brings that coordination to every part of the ride:
● Seamless coordination, always in sync: Districts can book a full school year of rides in minutes. When a pickup time, address, rider instruction, or any other detail changes, CareEngine automatically routes the update to everyone who needs it, the district, the family, and the CareDriver, so one update replaces five phone calls.

● Proactive, human-centered safety: CareEngine brings the CareDriver app, HopSkipDrive’s Safe Ride technology, and the Safe Ride Support team into one connected system that can flag unsafe driving while a CareDriver is still on the way to pickup, giving Safe Ride Support the chance to intervene before a child ever gets in the car.

● Individualized care at scale: CareEngine’s unified system captures each student’s specific needs and preferences, and seamlessly communicates them to the CareDriver at the right time, every ride. This creates a consistent experience tailored specifically to each student, even when the CareDriver changes. CareEngine makes it possible to deliver this level of individualized care consistently across thousands of students and millions of rides.

● Speed when it matters most: New rides are guaranteed in as little as six hours, and location changes in as little as two. For a student whose housing placement changes unexpectedly, that means getting to school the next morning, not the next week, protecting their attendance and continuity at their school of origin.

● A system that improves with every ride: Every ride adds useful information: how long a pickup actually takes, where delays keep repeating, and which instructions reduce confusion. HopSkipDrive’s team uses those insights to make coordination smoother and more reliable over time.

“We’ve spent more than a decade building purpose-built technology for every person involved in a student’s ride: districts, schools, families, riders, CareDrivers, and our safety team,” said Joanna McFarland, CEO and co-founder of HopSkipDrive.”CareEngine is what happens when all these applications connect with each other in one unified system. It helps transportation teams spend less time chasing information and more time serving their students. It’s not a new fix for the driver shortage. It’s what makes sure the capacity districts do have isn’t wasted on coordination they shouldn’t have to do by hand.”

CareEngine arrives as student transportation faces two forces at once. Need is rising: More students require specialized transportation than ever before, from students in temporary housing to students in foster care to students with IEPs who need consistent, individualized care. At the same time, capacity remains constrained and issues like budget restrictions and school bus driver shortages persist. HopSkipDrive’s 2026 State of School Transportation Report found that 71% of districts experienced at least one tangible operational consequence of driver shortages in the past year, including longer ride times, missed or late pickups, and staff pulled in to cover gaps. Nearly a quarter, 23%, say they can no longer offer transportation for extracurricular activities or field trips at all.

More information on CareEngine can be found here.

About HopSkipDrive
HopSkipDrive is the leader in safe, fast, and simple supplemental student transportation. The company is modernizing the $30 billion school transportation industry through two core solutions: a care-centered transportation marketplace and an industry-leading transportation intelligence platform, RouteWise AI. HopSkipDrive’s marketplace supplements school buses and existing transportation options by connecting kids to highly-vetted caregivers on wheels, such as grandparents, babysitters, and nurses in local communities. RouteWise AI helps schools and districts address critical challenges, including budget cuts, bus driver shortages, and reaching climate goals. HopSkipDrive has supported over 14,500 schools across two dozen states, with over 2,000 school districts, government agencies, and nonprofit partners. Millions of rides across 130 million miles have been completed through HopSkipDrive since the company was founded in 2014 by three working mothers.

The post HopSkipDrive Debuts CareEngine, the Technology Platform Built to Keep Every Student Ride Coordinated appeared first on School Transportation News.