A district that has lived through a bus-service breakdown and a vendor switch — now on a six-year Schmitty & Sons contract with My Ride K-12 for parents, across a valley geography that pushes students past the two-mile mandate.
See it with Stillwater's real routesStillwater Area Public Schools (ISD 834) serves about 8,300 students in 12 schools — seven elementary, two middle, one high school, plus an alternative learning center — across the St. Croix Valley. Its recent transportation history is a cautionary tale other districts study: after a period of well-publicized busing challenges with late and missed routes, the board approved a six-year contract with Schmitty & Sons Transportation effective July 2022, covering all routes and including a sublease for the contractor to store buses at the district’s Lake Elmo terminal.
Parents track buses with My Ride K-12, Tyler’s app, promoted by the district as its new GPS tracker. Walk zones are split sharply by level: elementary students are eligible at 0.5 miles and beyond, while grades 6–12 are eligible at 2 miles and beyond — the statutory floor — with a hazardous-roadway exception carrying the eligibility load in between. Stop placement policy is explicit: students typically walk no more than half a mile to a stop, and sidewalks or street lights are not stop criteria — safety is judged on driver visibility, road speed, obstacles, and route flow.
The district also offers a Decline Transportation opt-out form — a lever for planning routes around students who actually ride. A vendor switch, an app switch, and township geography that stretches past the two-mile mandate: Stillwater’s stack has been reassembled recently, which is precisely when districts evaluate what they actually want their transportation platform to do.
ISD 834’s rural townships — May, Grant, West Lakeland — push many students past §123B.88’s two-mile mandatory-transport line, and with 6–12 eligibility set exactly at 2.0 miles, hazard evaluations under the §123B.92 excess-transportation provisions decide the borderline cases. MN-36, the main east-west corridor, is a §169.444 separated roadway — a never-cross segment through the district’s heart — with MN-95 along the river and US-61 to the north adding fast corridors where §169.443’s 300-foot amber rule constrains stop spacing.
Notably, the district’s own published stop-safety criteria — driver visibility, road speed, obstacles, route flow, explicitly not sidewalks or street lights — read like a specification for criteria-based crossing evaluation. That is exactly what Guardian Route’s stop engine does, systematically, for every stop.
| The job | Stillwater today | With Guardian Route |
|---|---|---|
| Parent bus tracking | My Ride K-12 (Tyler) — real-time arrival estimates and live trackingSee the full comparison → | FamilyView — native parent app with live ETAs, push alerts, and four languages, included in the platform |
| Vendor-transition continuity | Route and student data migrated between vendor stacks during the 2022 contractor switch | Smart Import + OneRoster sync — district-owned data that survives any future contractor or vendor change |
| Stop safety criteria | Published criteria (visibility, speed, obstacles) applied stop by stop | Criteria-based crossing and stop evaluation applied systematically to every stop, with the reasoning recorded |
| Opt-out management | Decline Transportation form tracked administratively | Opt-outs flow into eligibility so routes serve actual riders — fewer stops, tighter routes |
Schmitty & Sons Transportation, under a six-year contract effective July 2022 covering all routes — with buses stored at the district’s Lake Elmo terminal under a sublease. The switch followed a period of well-publicized busing challenges under the prior arrangement.
My Ride K-12, Tyler’s parent app, offering real-time arrival estimates and live bus tracking.
Elementary (K–5) students are eligible at 0.5 mile or farther from school; grades 6–12 at 2 miles or more, with a hazardous-roadway exception. Students typically walk no more than half a mile to their assigned stop.
Per district policy: driver visibility, road speed, obstacles, and route flow — explicitly not sidewalks or street lights. Guardian Route applies the same class of criteria systematically, evaluating every stop against road speed, traffic, lanes, and crossing safety.
District information on this page is compiled from public sources — district transportation pages, board policies, and news coverage — as of July 2026, and may change. Guardian Route is an independent product and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Stillwater Area Public Schools. Confirm current policies directly with the district.
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