Enhancing School Safety and the Student Pickup Experience Using AWS with Pikmykid

Pikmykid is the brainchild of Pat Bhava, a serial entrepreneur who used to spend hours in lengthy car lines when picking up his daughter. One day, school staff guided a child who was not his daughter into his car by accident. That was when inspiration struck. He founded Pikmykid in 2013 and built Pikmykid’s first product, the Dismissal Management software, completely on AWS.

In 2017, NJE’s administrative staff took notice. “AWS was known for its reliability and scalability,” says Virginia Parish, senior director of marketing at Pikmykid. These features were precisely what Pikmykid needed to be successful, especially scalability. After all, teachers would only rarely need it during instructional hours. But when the bell rings, usage instantly spikes. With Pikmykid on AWS, the app can use scaling solutions like Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), which distributes network traffic to improve and automate application scalability.

At the time, NJE was straining under the increasing size of its student population and looking for a solution. Between 2016 and 2023, NJE’s student body grew from around 550 to 700. About 80 percent of them were picked up in cars at the end of the school day. The traditional radio-and-clipboard dismissal method became a logistic nightmare. When the principal at the time arranged a search for a more efficient solution, NJE found Pikmykid.

NJE soon found that Pikmykid’s Dismissal Management was the right choice. The Dismissal Management service was simple to learn, and the company provided useful learner’s guides. When problems arose, Pikmykid’s support team resolved most of them in 10–15 minutes. And the solution itself was user friendly. Instead of clipboards, staff now carry smartphones to keep track of students. For car pickups, it is a matter of two swipes: one to check in the driver and the other to dismiss the student.

“My current receptionist has worked at several schools outside of the district—before Pikmykid,” says Tammy Watts, NJE’s current principal. “At first, she was a little skeptical. But then, 2 days into the school year, she told me that the front office was now like heaven on earth.” Dismissal Management got rid of calls from parents or guardians who wanted to change their child’s pickup plan or were wondering where their child was. With Pikmykid, parents can send the school updates through a separate parent app, which then feeds into the staff dashboard on the school’s Dismissal Management portal.

Pikmykid’s service has a 99.9 percent uptime, meaning near-real-time updates from parents or staff are seldom delayed because of downtime. This is possible through AWS services like Amazon ElastiCache, a fully managed service that delivers near-real-time, cost-optimized performance for applications.

Dismissal Management also addresses security. Pikmykid helped NJE set up a geofence—a virtual perimeter that can detect movement within its boundaries—around its car lines. When the geofence is connected to Dismissal Management, the software informs staff when a particular car enters a car line. To help NJE keep its students’ data safe, Pikmykid uses AWS services like AWS Shield, which automatically detects and mitigates network-level distributed denial of service events.

Pikmykid studies have found that its service saves teachers about 5,000 hours throughout the school year. And the software saves about 30 hours’ worth of waiting in car lines per year. Furthermore, with less waiting and more efficient bus loading, a school can save 20,800 pounds of carbon emissions per year.

Dismissal Management has the flexibility to deal with unexpected situations. Around 2019, a water main broke, and NJE had to dismiss its students early. The school notified families through the parent app and only had to change the dismissal time in the Pikmykid software. The rest went like any other day. And during the COVID-19 pandemic, schools were facing bus driver shortages, resulting in longer bus routes and more pickups by car. Besides notifying parents about bus schedules, Dismissal Management’s efficiency optimization helped make NJE’s increased number of car lines manageable. “It has run the test of time by now,” says Watts.

Pikmykid will always remain a part of NJE’s workflows. “I think if I told my teachers that there was no more Pikmykid, there would be pushback. They would donate their own money to pay for it,” says Watts. “It’s the first thing I budget every year. It’s a no-brainer to me.”