Answers for
transportation directors.

It depends on your size and the usual troubleshooting along the way, so we scope a realistic timeline with you up front. As a rule of thumb, most districts are live within a couple of weeks — roster import and admin setup, then driver device provisioning and parent onboarding — and a small pilot on one or two schools can go live faster.

The driver taps the student’s name on the bus tablet to mark them boarded or exited — one tap, under a second. Districts that prefer students check themselves in can enable a personal lunch code or PIN the student enters on the tablet. Either way it records the same boarding/exit event, and we’re adding more hands-off options over time.

No. Students never install the app, never have an account, and never need to carry a phone. Boarding is handled by the driver, or by the student entering a short code on the bus tablet if your district turns that on.

Any modern tablet or phone works — Android or Apple, whatever your drivers already carry. You can use your existing devices, or we can source them for you; either way it’s itemized in your quote.

Today we import your roster by CSV, which every major SIS can export, so you can be up and running without an integration project. Direct SIS integrations are on our roadmap — tell us what you run and we’ll factor it into your rollout plan.

Kidaboard is built to operate as a school official under your district’s control, with student data used only to run the transportation service — no advertising, no profiling, no data sale. Students have no accounts and submit nothing themselves, which keeps us outside COPPA’s parental-consent mandate. Full detail is on our Compliance brief, and a formal Data Processing Addendum is available at moe@kidaboard.com.

In Google Cloud regions within the United States. We can provide hosting and subprocessor detail for your procurement and IT review on request.

Retention is configurable per district — anywhere from 30 to 1825 days, defaulting to one year (365 days). Boarding and exit events older than your window are automatically purged. Roster records are removed when a student leaves your enrollment.

Never. We don’t sell personal information, we don’t train models on student data, and we don’t share with advertisers. The service exists only to operate Kidaboard for your district.

The driver keeps checking students in — events are queued locally on the device and sync the moment signal returns. No data is lost and no workflow breaks. Parents see those updates a few minutes late; everything else is unaffected.

Location comes from the driver device’s GPS, typically accurate to within 3–10 meters, and updates every 10 seconds while the route is active.

No. Access is enforced at the database layer, not just in the app. A guardian account can only read records for students explicitly linked to it, and a district can only ever see its own data. Cross-family and cross-district access are architecturally impossible.

The driver can mark any student boarded, exited, or absent by name from the roster at any time — nothing depends on a specific device or tag. At the end of a route the app surfaces anyone still unresolved so nobody is left unaccounted for.

Every district is quoted individually, because the right number depends on how many riders you have, the size of your fleet, and whether you want us to supply hardware. The fastest path is a short call — tell us about your district and we’ll put together a quote and pilot terms.

Yes. We offer a free 30–60 day pilot on one or two schools — no cost and no commitment — so you can see it working on real routes before any contract.

After a successful pilot, districts move to an annual or multi-year agreement. The exact terms and rate are part of your quote — there are no per-feature surprises.

You own your data. We’ll export it in standard formats on request, and we delete our copies from production after your contract ends.

Everything — software, plus any devices or add-ons you want us to supply — is itemized in one quote, so you see the full cost up front. Ask us for a quote.