North Hills parents excited by new app that lets them track school buses in real time

The North Hills High School band kept the energy up Tuesday morning as students arrived for the first day of school.

“That’s why we have our band here to welcome them. We want to turn today into sort of like a pep rally,” said Dr. Patrick Mannarino, North Hills School District superintendent. “You can hear the excitement. You can see the excitement when the students are walking up onto our campus.”

New this year for district families is access to the StopFinder app. It’s an app that allows parents to see where their child’s bus is in real time.

Parents are probably already tracking their child’s location, but the elementary kids, most of them do not have phones," said Heather Pelat, director of communications with North Hills School District. “So I think especially for those families with the younger children, it’s going to be great, just a piece of mind that they arrive at school safely.”

Parents can also set up geo-alerts, which will send a notification to their phone when their bus is minutes away from their stop.

They can also share that with babysitters, grandparents, or anyone who might be in charge of getting their kids to and from the bus.

It’s an exciting thing for Nataly Price, a mom of four.

“I have two amazing babysitters that come through the week for me to help get them off the bus, and I can use the share feature in the app to give them the kids that they need to see on what days,” Price said. “They will be able to see my daughter comes from Oakland, so I can set a geo-tracker on the McKnight Road exit on I-279, and I know that that gives either me or my babysitter time to get to my house if we’re doing something and can’t be there.”

She also said it will come in handy on those bitterly cold winter days.

“I make my oldest walk to the bus stop a lot because typically I’m having the hair fight in the morning with my daughter. So I make him walk to the bus so it will be really helpful to know, like, ‘hey, you can walk out right now and you don’t have to wait down there for long,’” she said.

The district said emails went out over the last month to parents with their child’s activation link to create an account on StopFinder.

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