If you're a parent who has ever had to deal with the gridlock of picking your kids up from school, get ready to say, "Why didn't I think of that?!"
A Tampa entrepreneur, Pat Bhava, noticed how crazy the wait times were after he sold his downtown restaurant in 2013 and landed pick-up-the-kid duty.
"The next thing I knew I was sitting in this car line every day and there was 30 to 40 minutes of wait time," Bhava, then the father of a fifth-grader at the Roland Park K-8 magnet school, told our news partner The Tampa Bay Times.
Determined to created a process beyond walkie-talkies, clipboards, and sticky notes, he created an app to manage a school's student dismissal process, automatically sequence cars, display the status of students, and instantly handle chores such as updating lists for delegated pick-up duties when a parent can't make it.
PikMyKid also works for bus lines and tracks students who walk home or attend after-school programs. If a bus breaks down, the driver alerts the school and the system informs the parents whose children are on the bus.
The system debuted at Berkeley Prep and the Academy of Math and Science in the 2015-16 school year, and one parent told the Times "it was revolutionary."
The Times reports Bhava has raised about $450,000 in seed capital and is in the market to raise $1.5 million more. The PikMyKid system will be in more than 100 schools across eight states, Mexico and Saudi Arabia by the end of 2016, but only include private schools, charters and day care centers who, Bhava says, can act without the bureaucracy of a public school district.
