After years of parent complaints about the StopFinder app, Prince George’s County Public Schools (PGCPS) is officially phasing in a new bus tracking app, Chipmunk, in the 2025-26 school year.
The announcement came during the June 27 Board of Education meeting, where district leaders outlined updates to the PGCPS Transportation Action Plan.
StopFinder Frustrations
The current StopFinder app has had many complaints from the Prince George’s County community, with major glitches and other issues that affect smooth and reliable student transportation (see stories in the February 6, 2025, issue). “StopFinder stopped finding children a long time ago,” joked Board Member Phelton Moss, Ph.D., during the recent board meeting.
One of the key issues with StopFinder, which partners with the TransFinder routing system, is its inability to accurately track buses running multiple trips. This has caused confusion and delays in communication, with bus drivers reporting constant buffering and difficulties connecting to the system.
“Currently the app cannot correlate the GPS to the multiple trips assigned to that bus,” said PGCPS Director of Transportation Keba Baldwin. “So even though you will see that start time on the app, you won’t see the bus [in the app] if there are multiple trips.”
Chipmunk will operate under a system called BusPlanner that houses the GPS and routing systems. The transportation team explained that it will be much more user-friendly and accurate, ensuring that parents can more effectively track the bus coming to their stop.
Another benefit is that unlike StopFinder, Chipmunk will automatically include GeoAlerts without requiring families to set them up manually.
“One of the added benefits of Chipmunk over StopFinder is also the fact that parents will no longer have to set GeoAlerts manually, it will be automatically built into the system because despite our best efforts it just was difficult for families to navigate that process,” said PGCPS Chief Operating Officer Charoscar Coleman.
Chipmunk Launch
Baldwin explained that the new app will be launching in two phases, beginning with special education students during the first semester and extending to the rest of the community in the second semester. “This allows us to have a smaller subset target to really work out any kinks that we may have so that second semester we will fully roll that out with everyone else,” said Baldwin.
Administrators emphasized that StopFinder will remain available throughout the fall, but Chipmunk will become the default system by spring 2026, pending a successful rollout among special education routes.
The previous contract with TransFinder had a cost of $111,825 in 2022 and $117,416 in 2023, according to the contract obtained by the News Review. Those amounts, as well as previous yearly costs, were paid by the company BusPatrol on behalf of PGCPS. BusPatrol was the recipient of a no-bid contract for the school bus cameras, which made over $6.6 million for the company in 2023 (see the February 6 issue) and was flagged in a recent legislative audit of the school system published in March.
Parents will likely be relieved to have a new bus tracking app coming soon but also disappointed to find the incoming Chipmunk App has a 1.5 star rating on Google Play and a 1.2 star rating in Apple’s App Store. PGCPS had not responded to our request for comment on the app’s track record or cost by time of press.
More information on the rollout timeline and usage instructions for Chipmunk is expected closer to the start of the school year.
