How to Manage a Successful School Carpool

2020 has been an insane year, and it’s going to get crazier once school starts. Simplify your life by using these tips and tricks and set up a school carpool today!

What is a school carpool?

School carpool is the process of 2 or more families taking turns driving children to and from school.

You can use carpools for an abundance of afterschool activities. Including dance, sports, art, and more!

Benefits of carpooling

There are numerous benefits to carpooling, as you will see. 

Saves Time

Depending on how many adults you have, you may only need to drive to school several times a week instead of daily.

Saves gas

Because you’re driving less, you save gas, put fewer miles on your car, and such.

Saves money

You can save money by carpooling because it saves you time, gas, and more.

Environmental Reasons

Carpooling helps the environment by decreasing carbon emissions by lowering the number of cars on the road.

Create relationships with people in your community

Creating and maintaining a carpool will develop relationships with people in your community.

Tips for a successful carpool

There are lots of things that you can set up and do today, to make your back to school season easier, especially with carpooling.

Create a rapport with potential members

Take advantage of the summer to start this.

Do a few practices to different events or such with your group. Ensure that all the parents and children get along well.

Use an app – Karpool Club & PMK

There are dozens of phone apps that you can use to simplify your carpool process.

Karpool Club is one such app. It enables you to find people to carpool with, manage your group, communicate with everyone, and track the drive to increase children’s safety.

Communicate, communicate, communicate

Communication is key to anything being successful—particularly, a school carpool.

You’re entrusting your child(ren) with these people; you should collect a variety of information to enable trust and keep the kids safe.

Here is a sample list of information that you should swap:

• Contact information
  • Everyone who could potentially participate in the carpool needs to share their contact information with the whole group.
  • And, you should all meet up in person at some time to get to know each other.
• Schedule 
  • Decide on a driving lineup that works best for your group.
• Possible changes
  • Does your calendar have priorities that unfortunately line up with days you typically drive? 
  • Communicate these as soon as possible.
• Car Seats
  • Young children may require car seats. Do you have extra? Do they need to bring their own? 
  • Figure this out ahead of time.
• Allergies/snacks
  • Children are often hungry after school; having a snack on hand for the carpool home will ease tension. 
  • However, food discussions with others in your group need to happen before distributing snacks. Especially if there are children with allergies or dietary restrictions in your carpool.
• After school events
  • Are their common after school activities that several kids in your group attend? Could you add those into the schedule?
  • If not, do you need to set up a separate carpool for them? Or can you work your schedule around them? 

Don’t have too many people in your carpool.

Your carpool size will depend on how many available seats you have in your vehicle and the age of the children you’re transporting. 

If the children can get themselves into the car, buckle themselves properly, and be respectful of driving time, it’s easier to have a bigger one. But if you’re going to daycare and working with toddlers, you can probably only handle one or two extra kids. 

Set rules for the kids when they’re in your car

Before you start your carpool, discuss car rules with the group to ensure expectation continuity with the kids. See if you all can come up with similar guidelines to limit confusion. 

Once school starts, remind kids of the rules regularly and communicate any rule breaks to the appropriate parent.

PikMyKid’s School Carpool App

PikMyKid was started to create a school dismissal solution. Along the way, we’ve realized other problems surrounding schools. And, we’re working hard to create software and solutions to fix them. Carpool is just one of those problems. 

Karpool club

We created Karpool club in 2018 to solve the communication problems of carpooling. It’s challenging to manage multiple people in a carpool. And even harder to manage numerous ones if you have more than one child or they’re in after school activities.

This app simplifies the whole carpooling process. 

Carpooling in a post-pandemic world

2020 has been one of the craziest years ever. From a pandemic to wildfires to protests, this back to school season will be even more complicated than usual. We can’t talk about carpools without mentioning factors that will impact yours this year. 

A few tips for running an efficient and safe carpool during this time:

• Hand sanitizer
  • Have all kids sanitize their hands soon after entering the vehicle
• Don’t let kids share personal items
• Communicate with others in your group if your kid feels sick and alert them to any updates on their condition.

In conclusion

School carpools are complicated to set up and manage, but once you get them going, it will change your life for the better. Use these tips and the time you have before school starts to set yours up.