How One Bus Driver Led the BusRight Rollout at Ogden Community Schools of Iowa

At Ogden Community Schools, a small, rural district in central Iowa, the bus that picks up a kindergartner in the morning will likely run a track meet in the afternoon, and a field trip the next day. Five daily routes transport around 350 students each school day, and drivers rotate between buses and routes depending on availability and ever-changing weekly activity plans. When the district decided to roll out BusRight to support this operation, Director of Transportation Denny Good didn't hand implementation to an outside vendor or wait for a consultant to set things up. Instead, he turned to one trusted bus driver to create a smart rollout plan that met the district’s unique needs.

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Overview

• District: Ogden Community Schools, Iowa
• Students Transported: ~350 students 
• Daily Routes: 5 
• BusRight Customer Since: January 2025

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Starting With One Bus: A Strategic Rollout 

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Dezaray Buchwald’s official job title is Bus Driver, but her day-to-day role includes much more than time behind the wheel. In addition to her daily route, she runs activity trips, and now handles what she calls “the computer stuff” using BusRight.

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When Ogden’s transportation director, Denny Good, first introduced BusRight, the team didn't roll the system out across all five routes at once. They started with one — Dezaray's. Dezaray drove her route with her BusRight tablet for about a month before anyone else used it. Leadership needed to know how the technology would handle the district's dirt roads, and whether it would build routes the way local drivers would. What would it look like to skip a stop, add a stop, or make routing adjustments in real-time?. Dezaray served as the perfect litmus test to ensure the system would be the right fit for both drivers and office staff.

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“Let's put it in a bus and try it,” Dezaray remembers suggesting to Denny. “Let's figure out how it makes stops, how it runs the route. Does it like our rural dirt roads?”

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Once she was confident in the tablet workflow, the department rolled them out to the rest of their fleet. The following school year, they layered in student tracking, again starting on Dezaray's bus. The incremental approach gave her and Denny time to understand the system and learn how to pinpoint problems before the district was fully reliant on it.

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Any Driver, Any Bus, Any Route

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Ogden Community Schools runs five daily routes with a rotating team of drivers. A driver might be on one route one week and behind the wheel of an activity bus the next. The district has also occasionally shared drivers with neighboring districts, which means a driver might step into an Ogden bus without knowing the routes or even the area.

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Before BusRight, that dynamic scheduling came with challenges. Getting a new driver up to speed meant piling into a minivan and physically driving the route together, pointing out landmarks. Denny would often have to give instructions like, “You go to this house. We have one place we turn around that's not even a house we pick up at — it's a paintball field. You pull in this parking lot, turn around, and then come back.”

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With BusRight, that turnaround location is clearly displayed and labeled on the route. So are other important details, like the hill that gets slick in bad weather, the curve where visibility is poor, and the long driveways where families need a few extra minutes to come out. “Any of our drivers can get in any bus and drive that route, whether we've run it before or not with them,” Dezaray said. “That was huge for us, because there's been times we've shared bus drivers from another district, and not only do they not know the routes, they don't necessarily know the area either.”

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Peace of Mind for Parents

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Ogden's interest in BusRight’s Student Tracking feature wasn't theoretical. A few years ago, a neighboring district experienced a school shooting. For families in the small community, knowing their child is safe and accounted for became more important than ever.

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BusRight’s Student Tracking capabilities gave parents and school administrators easy answers. When something unexpected occurs on a route, whether it’s a flat tire or weather that slows things down, the team can send an alert through the BusRight Parent app directly to families on that route without sending an alert to the entire district.

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Dezaray explains how these targeted alerts help her riders. One mom on her route works during the morning pickup and uses the notifications to gauge when her kids should start walking down their long driveway. “She gets the notice and can call the kids and say, 'Hey, don't go out to the bus stop yet, bus isn't there.’”

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How a Digital Platform Replaced Outdated Paper Maps

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Before BusRight, Ogden planned routes on an Excel spreadsheet and a large wall map. But that approach had limits, even in a district where staff is well-versed in their territory. “When you drive that route every day, you find the shortcuts, the things that work, the things that don't, the roads that are not great to drive on,” Dezaray said. “You don't always know those things when you're mapping them out until you start driving them.”

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She's also been candid about a habit she's watched play out for years: some drivers run the same route the same way every day, regardless of whether all the kids are riding. With BusRight, the platform reroutes for them automatically based on real-time ridership data, mapping the shortest path based on who's on board that day. With diesel prices rising in their area, those miles add up. Dezaray expects the district will see meaningful savings on mileage and fuel over the coming years with BusRight.

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What's Next for Ogden Community Schools

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Dezaray and Denny are identifying new ways to streamline their transportation processes with BusRight, like using the platform to request and plan field trip routes. It’s another example of incremental adoption that defines Ogden's strategic approach: try it on one bus, work out the kinks, and expand across the fleet. A small district doesn't have the luxury of getting a technology rollout wrong, and BusRight has met the moment every step of the way. That instinct, to start with one bus and let a driver prove it out, is why the rollout worked. Ogden didn't adopt BusRight because a vendor convinced them to. They adopted it because Dezaray drove it first.

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