Finding the proper neighborhood school

  • By Sharon Haught
  • May 8, 2010
  • 524
                        
For the parents of school-age children one question seems to pop up more than any other. Which elementary school will my child attend? That information will now be at their fingertips 24 hours a day, seven days a week, directly from their home computer, thanks to the Wooster City School District’s recent implementation of a unique version of the Transfinder software system. Members of the board of education viewed a demonstration of the new system’s capabilities from Dave Kocevar, director of business and community affairs, during their April 27 meeting. “We have had numerous requests from parents, and probably more from our Realtors, in regard to the boundaries of our elementary schools. If somebody is coming into the district and is looking at a particular address, which elementary school does it go to? We have struggled with that technology,” said Superintendent Michael Tefs. All that changed when Kurt Miller, transportation supervisor, tweaked the Transfinder software system the district uses for bus routing and posted the software on the district’s website for use by the general public. According to Kocevar, parents can simply log on the district’s website at www.woostercityschools.org and click on the Family Resources link. Once there, visitors to the site can click on the Wooster City bus route and school attendance area search to be taken directly to the Transfinder software. “If you type in an address, you will get a graphic of that house location with information on the left hand side as to the elementary school that that house is located in as well as the AM and PM bus routes,” said Kocevar. According to Kocevar, the time and bus number are included on the informational screen on the left hand side of the screen. Those using the system will also have “the ability to zoom out and give you a better graphic of the travel of that bus in and around our district,” noted Kocevar. Information on routes to elementary schools, Wooster High School, Edgewood Middle School, Boys Village and the Wayne County Schools Career Center is also available on the system. “It will give a person looking for housing in our area the ability to see what kind of bussing there is in the area, where the stops might be and what school attendance area they will be in,” said Kocevar. “We feel that this will be an invaluable link to our community members and our staff members,” said Kocevar. “We get a lot of calls, particularly at the beginning of the school year, just seeking this type of basic information. We hope to give this to our community at their fingertips.” The best part of the new system is that it was free of cost to the district. “It cost our district nothing to incorporate that,” noted Tefs. “We already have a system that we use in our transportation department that’s software that builds our routes. We just incorporated that technology with some little tweaks to it and now it’s on our website.” Tefs noted that while the routes themselves will disappear temporarily as the routes are shut down at the end of the school year and rebuilt for the 2010-2011 school year, the remaining functionality of the system will be intact.


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