Tips for a Successful Carpool for Kids

Submitted by Adam on September 9, 2010

Topic: Home Helper

Tags: School Parent Projects Magnets Kids Home Helper Design & Print Center Carpool Car

Average:

Adam's blog

The new school year is upon us, and I know for many parents that means relying on a carpool to make their kids’ packed agendas possible. It takes a close network of friends to help get kids to school on time, picked up once classes and after-school activities end, and returned home safely. It can be a tough job getting a group of rambunctious grade-schoolers around – so we’ve got some tips to help things go smoothly and safely from day one.

1. Organization – Involve everyone in the group to setup a schedule that ensures no one is doing more work than anyone else. You want to establish pick-up times so parents knows when kids need to be ready and everyone makes it to school on time. It’s a good idea to have a primary and backup driver for each day in case something comes up. And, of course, carpools work best when the families live within a few minutes of each other. One child whose house is fifteen minutes farther away than everyone else can make behind-schedule mornings very difficult.

2. Make a Contact List – This is pretty straight forward, but you want to be able to contact parents in case of an emergency, scheduling changes (like when you’ve got an early morning meeting and someone needs to cover for you) and for planning. You would want at least two contacts for each child.

3. Car Safety - Have a discussion with the children and the drivers about being safe in the car. Develop a set of rules and expectations for each driver and child to follow. There should be no arguments about buckling up or fights in the back seat – at least in theory.

4. Identify your car – This can be tough. Sometimes you may have last minute changes to the carpool driver schedule – and let’s face it, many cars look alike. If you can’t figure out which car is yours in the mall parking lot, your kids might not fare much better in the afternoon with a line of black SUVs and silver sedans looking at them. A good solution for this is to create vehicle magnets with bright colors and maybe a special logo for the carpool that you can stick on your car when picking up the kiddos. The kids just need to know to look for the magnet. These are easier to design than you’d think and can be ordered online through FedEx Office Design & Print Center.

5. After school activities – Baseball, football, ballet, gymnastics, karate...Yikes! Kids are busy these days, so make sure you keep extracurricular activities in mind when working out the schedules.

6. Punctuality – All drivers need to follow the pickup schedule and parents should have their kids ready to go. Don’t keep the driver waiting or hold him or her up talking about last night’s episode of “American Idol.” Same goes in the afternoon for the pickup. You don’t want the little ones waiting around because you lost track of time at work.

Hopefully these simple tips will help make your carpool a successful one. Happy carpooling!

Related FedEx Office Solutions: FedEx Office Design & Print Center, Vehicle Magnets

Comments

Post new comment

Your name: *

E-mail: *

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.

Homepage:

Subject:

Comment: *

Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
Lines and paragraphs break automatically.

All comments are moderated. Comments will appear as soon as they are approved by the moderator. Anonymous comments will not be posted. In addition, we will not post comments if they are defamatory, spam, or off-topic. If you do submit a comment, you warrant that it is your own original work, that it is not defamatory or offensive and does not infringe any law.