District Turns Transportation Challenges Into Opportunities
June 04, 2026 by Anonym
In 2016, challenges were quickly adding up for the transportation department at Camden County School District, Georgia. Led by Transportation Director Dwayne Dimsdale, the department was simultaneously tasked with reducing its bus fleet, making routes more efficient, and proposing and implementing a new school transportation schedule. The elementary school day was increased by 40 minutes, and secondary schools were dismissed earlier. Dimsdale had a hunch that implementing Tyler’s student transportation software would allow him to address each of these overlapping issues. “The comprehensive change required rebuilding our routing system from the ground up,” he said, “A daunting task, but a great opportunity to fully explore the capabilities of Tyler’s transportation software.”
A Shifted School Schedule
The district’s transportation office and Tyler’s support team quickly worked to address the district’s multiple goals. During the 2016-17 school year, “Camden County Schools used the program to prepare scenarios for proposed school schedule changes,” Dimsdale explained. “We were able to provide three separate transportation scenarios to give our school board a choice about how to handle the newly proposed school schedule.”
Once a schedule was chosen, he said, “We started from scratch and used Tyler’s student transportation software to draw our proposed routes. The program did a great job giving us base routes to work from.” The transportation team hit the ground running and leveraged the software to keep families informed. “Our first day of full implementation was the first day of school. We used the software’s parent portal to make the new information available to the public.”
Future-Ready Transportation Tools
Tyler’s student transportation software helped the district adapt to meet future challenges as well. “Since our implementation,” Dimsdale said, “we have begun using the planning feature to create useful zoning scenarios that include population of customized designed boundaries. This feature is extremely helpful when looking at rezoning due to overcrowding.”
Camden County Schools has experienced numerous benefits since switching to Tyler’s student transportation solutions. Dimsdale said, “We’ve had a 9% reduction in the number of buses needed, from 79 to 72; a 12% reduction in the number of daily miles traveled, from 4,004 to 3,544; a 12% reduction in fuel costs; a reduction in drivers needed to complete our routes; and an overall decrease in average route time. And we saw all these benefits while our daily ridership increased by 12%, from 8,581 students to 10,391 students.”