This podcast episode delves into the intricacies of Cobb Schools' transportation system, emphasizing the paramount importance of safety in the transportation of students. We engage with Mike Quick, the Senior Executive Director of Transportation, who explains the rigorous protocols in place to ensure that the bus fleet operates securely and efficiently. Among the critical topics discussed are the measures taken during adverse weather conditions, the rationale behind mid-year route adjustments, and the collaborative efforts required between families and the transportation department to safeguard students. Furthermore, we explore upcoming technological advancements aimed at enhancing communication between the transportation department and families, thereby improving the overall experience for everyone involved. Join us as we uncover the vital behind-the-scenes operations that contribute to the excellence of Cobb Schools' transportation services.

Guest:

Mike Quick, Senior Executive Director, Transportation

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• Cobb Schools Transportation

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Takeaways:

1. In this episode, we delve deeply into how Cobb's bus fleet is meticulously maintained to ensure the utmost safety of its passengers.
2. We discuss the critical role that safety plays in the transportation of students, emphasizing its priority in every action undertaken by the staff.
3. Listeners will gain insights into the rationale behind mid-year route changes, which may result from construction projects or fluctuations in ridership.
4. We highlight the importance of collaboration between parents and transportation services to enhance the safety and efficiency of student transit.
5. The podcast reveals the ongoing technological advancements aimed at improving communication with families, particularly regarding bus tracking and operational updates.
6. Finally, we address the proactive steps taken by the transportation department in response to severe weather conditions, ensuring student safety is never compromised.

No, I'm not going to sing it. The wheels on the bus go round and round, but only if people behind the scenes make sure that happens.

All things transportation coming up next on the Inside Scoop. Hello and welcome back to the Inside scoop. I'm David Owen.

In this episode, we're going to learn how Cobb's bus fleet is kept safe, why routes can change mid year, the impacts of winter and springtime weather, and much more. Stick around to the end and you'll learn something new is on the horizon.

First, as always, like, subscribe and share this episode with another parent. They'll be glad you did. Cobb is known for excellence in many areas, but did you know that includes our transportation department, too?

Here to give us a scoop on all things transportation is the senior executive director, Mike Quick. Mike, welcome to the podcast. Good morning.

Thank you for having me.

So just to get us started, tell us a little bit about you and your background and what led you to your current position in Cobb schools.

Yeah, no, thank you. So for me, I'm a Cobb county dad. I've been in Cobb county for a very long time, 22ish years. And my kids we have, my wife and I have four children.

All, all four of them went to school here in Cobb County. A little shout out to still loving good in Hill Grove.

So, you know, a cluster I know very well, but, you know, very much so involved in the school district, was a, was a band dad for several years, helping with the transportation team.

That's commitment right there.

That's a lot of commitment there. And then also taught and coached basketball for many years in the Little Hawks League. So at times Coach 3, three teams at one time.

You are definitely immersed in the community for sure.

Very much so. Very.

That's wonderful. Now you in Cobb for 22 years, I think you said so. But what about your current position? How long have you been the senior executive director?

So been here since end of July. So we're not on a year yet.

Yeah.

And you know, in my time here, I've really had an opportunity to get to know the team, understand what we do here. And really, transportation is not all that different.

What I talk to my team about and what they hear me say all the time is I've done a lot of things in my career from a transportation standpoint, but the cargo that we have here at Cobb county is much more precious than what I've ever touched before. Yes, absolutely. So safety is always top of our mind. It's always the first thing that we think about in anything that we do here.

Yeah. So being a Cobb dad, as you say you had during earlier years, I would presume, a vested interest of your own in that precious cargo.

Your children rode the buses as well?

Absolutely.

Okay, so you got a little feedback from the other side, right?

Absolutely, absolutely.

So safety is absolutely the top priority in the school district. The superintendent has said this over and over. It doesn't matter how well you educate a, if kids aren't safe and feeling safe in the classroom.

But that also applies to getting there and going home at the end of the day. So what are some of the things happening behind the scenes every day that you and your staff do to make buses.

Make sure our buses are safe and students stay safe and feel safe.

You know, safety is really the thing that is paramount in everything we do. That is the first and, and conversation that we have with anything as it pertains to the transportation of our students behind the scenes.

Specific things that we do, you know, really starts with our drivers and our technicians. You know, our drivers do a, what we call a pre and a post trip inspection of the vehicle itself to make sure that it's safe to be on the road.

Wait, excuse me for interrupting. You said a pre and post trip. So every, every school day, they're doing before they drive out, they're looking. And at the end. Wow.

Correct. Before and after.

And any kind of defect, it could be a light bulb out, Anything is documented and goes to our maintenance team and our maintenance team handles that particular situation at that time.

Okay. Wow. That's. I had no idea that that level of involvement by the bus drivers.

Absolutely.

So that's, that's pretty amazing.

Then you go the next step. So every day that's happening, then every 20 days, our mechanics and technicians touch those buses for an inspection every 20 days.

So not only are we touching it every day from a driver's perspective, then we're having that with our technicians. And then annually, we have an inspection every year by Department of Public Safety. So that's upon us here in April.

We're going to do that as a two week process. So every one of our vehicles goes through that process and is inspected by dps.

So we're recording this in the middle of the school year. And sometimes families see route adjustments happen even though they've settled into a routine and, you know, everything seemed to be fine.

But just out of curiosity, what drives that? What usually is the cause of that sort of change in the middle of the school year?

Well, there's really a handful of things that could drive A change beginning of year, mid year, whenever it is in the school year. But some examples would be if there's a construction project that comes up, I think about kind of in the Harrison Allatoona area right now.

There's a lot of road work being done, construction work on the road. So.

Yeah.

And we get notified by the county when those projects take place. Okay. So when that happens, we plan that, we put it into our routing. There are situations where we might not even be able to get to a neighborhood.

Sometimes roads are closed and we'll have to route around and that's going to delay the time in which we get to a specific stop. So that's a pretty, you know, that happens fairly often. But then we have other things like ridership, ridership changes.

So the counts on the buses go up and down. And to make sure that we're efficient with our routing, there may be some changes caused by that.

And you know, we have to take this conversation back to safety as well. Safety is always critical. And I'll give you an example. We have a school this year, Bell's Ferry, that's undergoing some construction.

Yeah.

There's a neighborhood right next door that is normally a walk zone school. And the families walk to the school every day.

Sure.

But because of the construction and where the equipment is and sidewalks being blocked off, there isn't a way for those families to safely walk to and from home and school. So we have added a bus stop in that case to pick up those students and bring them to school versus putting them in a potentially unsafe situation.

Sure. And that is such an incredibly busy area too. That's huge.

So we are moving into, I guess you could say we're still in winter technically, but it's very much a spring day. On the day we're recording highs probably in the high 70s, I'm guessing. And pollen count through the roof, as usual is Atlanta. Right.

But as we are moving from the wintertime and going into springtime, it's a notorious question mark weather wise. It's either going to be ice storms and who knows what or we're going to have tornadoes outbreak at some point.

So how does the transportation department factor that stuff in as you're trying to serve, you know, thousands and thousands of students every day.

Yeah, it's a very good question. You know, and again, everything comes down to safety. What's the safest way for us to move students to and from school?

Yeah.

And you know, so for, from a transportation standpoint, we obviously stay very close to the weather channels. Make sure we're understanding what's going on out there on the roadways. And, you know, so we. We adjust what we do based on what we're.

What we're seeing and we're hearing from. From those professionals that do that. And, and so we'll make those. Those adjustments.

But, you know, for example, in the winter, if we see the storms coming, and of course, we're paying very close attention to what our leadership is saying as well.

Sure.

School closes, obviously we have a completely different response than if we're going to be in school, you know, so we just watch and we adjust.

And I would say, like, you know, winter storm, and let's just say, you know, like hurricanes and things like that, they're big, massive storms that we get a lot of notification on and we get that, you know, we can see that wide path of the storm and we can make adjustments in advance. Yeah, correct. So that's key. Different in the season that we're coming into, where tornadoes are a little more prevalent.

You know, they kind of pop up and just come and go and very volatile, so a little harder to plan on those events. But what I would say the first thing we do is if.

If we're at the beginning of school day or near dismissal, if we know that a severe storm is coming, the preference is not to board those students on the bus. We'd prefer to have them in the building where they're able to take shelter and be in a safe space.

And that can be different in different parts of the county, too. Right. I mean, Cobb is a huge place.

That's correct. What's happening on the south side of town isn't necessarily what's happening on the north side of town. So we have to adjust accordingly.

But, you know, if we are on the roadway and a storm pops up that we didn't see coming or there was no notification, our preference is to get them to a place where it's safe. Again, if we're passing a school, fire station, police station somewhere, we could deboard safely and have the students in a safe place.

That would be preferred. But again, tornadoes pop up and sometimes you have to react. So we have very defined process in that case.

And in transportation in general, whether it's a truck or a bus, you always want to park that large vehicle either back end, or we call it tail end or the front end into the wind, so less likely for it to blow over. And then from a student perspective, we want those students to be as low on the ground as possible.

We say below window level and we want them to cover themselves with something that they have, typically have a book bag so they can put that over their heads. A coat, something in case there's flying debris, they can protect themselves.

And that is in the event of something, essentially a tornado showing up right in front of the driver. Correct, Right.

Okay. Correct.

So transportation and families really have to work together. Right. Because we got bus stops.

And you mentioned earlier being able to collaborate to keep the children around Bell's Ferry elementary safe because the sidewalks were closed and so forth.

What are a few simple things that parents and families can do in collaboration with you guys to help keep our children safe as they're trying to get to and from school?

Well, the first thing I'll say, and what I really appreciate you saying, is collaboration.

You know, it's really encouraging to me when the parents and my staff on my team, we have the same common goal, and that's the safety of the students to and from school. So collaboration is a key word to me.

I've had a lot of great conversations with parents, you know, from our community, and some things brought to my attention that may have been a safety concern. And we've worked through those and made adjustments to routes or stops.

But I think one, from an understanding standpoint, if our parents and students can really understand the safety rules of the bus, the bus, as we say, is an extension of the classroom. Coming on the bus and behaving in a certain manner is what we need to do. So be seated different in the classroom, we can talk about.

But yelling, screaming, and, you know, that type of thing is a distraction to our driver. So I think about, you know, when I was driving my kids around when they were younger, and they're, you know,

I'll turn this car around, right?

I mean, you know, so it's a distraction.

You can't distract the bus. Right, right.

It's a distraction. So if we're, you know, being mindful of that when we're on the bus, it's really helpful to the driver to make sure that we have safe transit.

Okay. So just parents reinforcing the behavior on the bus is really, really key.

Let me ask you about things to come, because you had told me that there are some exciting things on the horizon.

What are some of the priorities or improvements that families can look forward to either finishing out this school year or come the beginning of next school year that can help with the overall relationship between families and transportation?

Yeah, I think everybody knows that we currently have an app that allows families to see the bus, track the bus See when their students are coming. But there is some communication there, but it isn't to the level that we'd like to see it.

Okay.

So we are in the process of a technology transformation and we are updating and upgrading our systems. We actually have one cluster, the Altoona cluster is live on that system today.

So we're getting ahead of it and figuring out the bugs and the things that we need to.

Working out the kinks.

Working out the kinks, exactly. And it's gone very well so far.

But what we're excited about, and to answer your question about the communication piece is in the new app that will be utilized as we go forward. There's much better communication.

So when there's a change in the bus, there's a delay on the route, the system will automatically send out messages to the families and caregivers that have the app and have that downloaded and give that notification that there's some kind of change. We also then, as the transportation leadership, have the ability to go in and send messages out and push messages out.

So if we have something that isn't automated, we can do that to make sure we communicate and the families know as quickly as possible. The one thing. And just kind of a sidebar.

The one thing I think is really cool about this technology versus what we have today is we have several families in our district that are not primary English speaking families.

The new app has the ability that you can go in and select your language of preference and everything that comes through in that app will be in that specific language. Even the canned messages that go out.

The only thing that doesn't translate into that specific language is anything that we freeform and send out individually. But all the others is in Spanish or whatever language they choose.

And the freeform, I would guess they could easily take, cut and paste into a translator online.

They could, yeah.

Well, Mike, this is great. Some exciting things have been happening. You guys are. We didn't even touch on some of the awards that you guys have gotten.

You do an annual rodeo, I think you call it, for bus driving skills and you've got recruitment events. Are you hurting for bus drivers at this point?

Is that so? We're actually. We're in pretty good shape.

And, you know, again, me learning the history, you know, when we came out of COVID you know, there was a significant shortage of drivers and the team did a very nice job executing through that and delivering and picking up students during that time. But we're in good shape. We have spare drivers, backup drivers that help us execute on a daily basis.

It's kind of like substitute teachers.

Exactly.

And then we also have staff that are in the office and part of the management team that have their CDLs and have driven buses and have the ability to get in and help execute too. So we're engaged.

It's probably good for them to get it and you to get out, get that real world feel experience. Well, thank you so much for coming by and taking some time.

We hope to be able to do a podcast with you before next school year so that people who might be a little nervous about sending young ones, maybe they haven't ridden the bus before, can make sure they understand the whole process process and it goes as smoothly as possible. So thanks again. I appreciate you coming on and sharing with us. Absolutely.

Thanks for having me.

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