DATE: Wednesday, September 3, 1997          TAG: 9709030452

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B5   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY KIA MORGAN ALLEN, STAFF WRITER 

DATELINE: PORTSMOUTH                        LENGTH:   88 lines

PORTSMOUTH SCHOOL BUSING MADE EASIER WITH SOFTWARE

It once took Tammy Spears months to work out the kinks in time-consuming problems such as complying with court-ordered, desegregation-related busing plans.

With 14,000 bus-riding students in Portsmouth, the job was tedious. Dots and thumbtacks on paper maps represented bus stops and riders, as they still do in most of the nation's school districts, including those in Hampton Roads.

But now a cutting-edge computer aid helps the transportation planner. She takes her mouse, carves out a bus route on a computer screen and weaves through a superimposed series of dots like a school bus zooms around road bumps.

On screen, the digitized display unfolds the city of Portsmouth's neighborhoods, streets and intersections, representing an electronic map. The district uses a system called EDULOG, which for three years has helped streamline its transportation system and establish school attendance boundaries.

``It's one way of determining (which) kids are supposed to be on the bus,'' Spears said. ``It's also nice when a parent can call and say, `My kid is John Doe; can you tell me what bus he rides?' ''

Parents, welcome to the new world of computer-monitored bus routing. The EDULOG system keeps track of students with a complete listing of their names, addresses and places they are expected to board buses. Lines radiate from dots and converge onto boxes to indicate where each student should wait.

In a phone call, parents can learn just how far children live from their designated school and determine if they are in a walking zone or require a bus pickup.

And if special education students arrive at home and no one is there, the bus driver can just radio in the child's name, and the emergency contacts will scroll on the screen. Spears said the district has a large number of students who are left home alone.

``That's a big problem. We have a lot of parents who are not home in the afternoons.'' Having EDULOG on hand has helped speed the process of finding alternative people to pick up those children.

The software also is used as a policing system, which helps to regulate bus overloading while keeping tabs on the students riding the routes.

``The bus driver will call in if they have an overload on the bus,'' said Spears from the district's Operations Center in Portsmouth. ``We use EDULOG to identify those kids. The bus driver will ask for names and addresses and we'll cross-reference with EDULOG.''

Spears said the procedure has cut down on zone-hopping, where students cross their designated school zone to board another bus, often to ride with friends. At times, it has caused problems for some children who were picked on by others who were not supposed to be on their bus.

School officials in Portsmouth say the $27,000 outlay for the software and the $2,700 annual upkeep has been worth it.

EDULOG helps parents determine if they are sending their children to the right schools, too. With a swift click, Spears can pull up a map of the city with a spidery cross-hatching of deep blue lines etched on a black background, and tell them if their child is attending a school out of their zone and out of the pickup range.

So far, said Spears, the program has proved its ability to dramatically simplify routine and tedious tasks that once took months to complete.

``It takes half the time . . .'' she said.

The EDULOG system was developed by a Missoula, Mont., firm called Education Logistics Inc. and is the biggest selling program of its kind in a small market niche.

Portsmouth is a relatively small school district and is the first one to use the automated transportation technology in Hampton Roads school districts.

Transportation planners from the neighboring Newport News and Petersburg, Va., area visited Spears' office to examine EDULOG for their own districts.

The Virginia Beach district expects to have a version of EDULOG online soon, said Dennis Crum, supervisor for transportation.

``We're working strenuously to get it in the next couple of months. We've been working on it for a year,'' he said.

And with fiscal prudence, a watchword for districts everywhere, the short cuts derived from computerized scheduling has allowed them to save money and acquire more buses.

And the Portsmouth district says, there are many other uses for the system.

For example, when some schools were recently made into community schools, officials were able to calculate reasonable walking distances for some 9,000 students in just a few days. Before, such an undertaking would have taken several months or more to complete, Spears said.

``I don't see how they did anything before without it,'' she said. ILLUSTRATION: MARK MITCHELL/The Virginian-Pilot

Tammy Spears, the Portsmouth school district's transportation

planner, uses EDULOG to monitor bus routing, track students,

streamline the transportation system and establish school attendance

boundaries. It has been used in Portsmouth for three years.

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