In many cases with specialized transportation, students are not simply brought from home to school and back. They may be at mom's house in the morning, then dad's in the PM. Or if they are HHM, they could regularly move from hotel, to shelter, to foster care, and so on. Your Airtable database has a way to mitigate these situations.


TABLE OF CONTENTS


The Alternate Sites Tab

Located next to your student data is a tab labeled "Alternate Sites," which is what we use to handle students going to multiple locations, or those that are highly mobile. 



In going here, you can add additional or common locations where students may be picked up aside from their home, and we will examine these scenarios below.


Multiple Locations

The most common example of this is split custody, where mom and dad live separately and the child shares time between them, but can apply to a variety of different scenarios. We will go over a case where a child goes between mom and dad's as an example, but this can be used for other similar cases such as bringing a child to daycare.


  1. Enter one address as the "primary" - In our system we have primary addresses and alternate sites. It doesn't matter which is which in this example. For this step, one of the two address as the primary under the student's address in the "Student Data" tab.
  2. Enter the other address as the "secondary" - This secondary address will be defined as the alternate site. As such, it can be entered in the "Alternate Sites" tab. Give the site a name (It can be as simple as "Dad's House", "Daycare", or another similar name. Fill in the full address after that.
  3. Note the student going to this address - Under the "Linked Student" field, add the name of the student going to this location. As you type, student names will show up, and you can select the one you want to be at this location.
  4. Write down when the student goes to each location - The best place to do this is under "Schedule notes" on the tab for student data. From there, we can set up their transportation based on the times they will go to each respective location.


Hotels or Shelters

Many HHM students end up in a hotel or at a homeless shelter. Since we can end up with many students at these locations, odds are we already have alternate sites in the system set up for them, which makes linking a student to a site even easier. We will use the example of a student going to a common homeless shelter, but this can also be used to add hotels, group homes, or other possible spots for transport.


  1. Leave the address in student data blank - Yes, this may seem counterintuitive, but consider this the "home" address for students. If they're at a place where multiple HHM kids are, this will streamline things in the long run.
  2. Enter the shelter or hotel location under the Alternate Sites tab - If the facility is already listed, you can skip this step entirely.
  3. Note the student going to this address - Under the "Linked Student" field, add the name of the student going to this location. As you type, student names will show up, and you can select the one you want to be at this location. If you have multiple students at the shelter or location, you can note all of them in this field.


This will cover the vast majority of special case scenarios for transportation. If there is a situation that isn't addressed by these, reach out to support and we will determine the best way to make sure we know where your student needs to go.