Transportation Routing System

Location:	Maryland
Posted:	Aug 5, 2026
Due:	Sep 16, 2026
Agency:	Montgomery County Public Schools
Type of Government:	State & Local
Category:	V - Transportation, Travel and Relocation Services
Solicitation No:	7254.1
Publication URL:	To access bid details, please log in.

Open Solicitation

Bid/RFP Number: 7254.1
Solicitation Title	Transportation Routing System
Due Date & Time	09/16/2026 02:00 PM
Contract Type	RFP
Buyer E-mail	Saudy_EspinalDeVeloz@mcpsmd.org
Description	Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) is issuing this Request for Proposals (RFP) to solicit qualified vendors to provide a comprehensive transportation routing system solution and all associated services. The selected solution will serve as the primary system of record for student transportation routing across the district and will replace the routing platform currently in use by the Division of Transportation Services. RFP 7254.1 FINAL.pdf 08/05/2026 RFP 7254.1_Attachment A_ Equal Opportunity Certification.pdf 08/05/2026 RFP 7254.1_Attachment B_Certification of Nonsegregated Facilities.pdf 08/05/2026 RFP 7254.1_Attachment C_Minority Business Enterprise.pdf 08/05/2026 RFP 7254.1 _Attachment D_Non-Debarment Acknowledgement.pdf 08/05/2026 RFP 7254.1_Attachment E_List of Data Elements.pdf 08/05/2026 RFP 7254.1_Attachment F_Technical_Requirements.xlsx 08/05/2026 Appendix A - MCPS General Contract Articles 2026 Update.pdf 08/05/2026
eMaryland Marketplace link	BPM058275

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August 5, 2026

RFP Number: 7254.1

Due Date: September 16, 2026

Open Time: 2:00 p.m.

To: Prospective Respondents:

Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) is issuing this Request for Proposals (RFP) to

solicit qualified vendors to provide a comprehensive transportation routing system solution

and all associated services. The selected solution will serve as the primary system of record for

student transportation routing across the district and will replace the routing platform currently

in use by the Division of Transportation Services.

The contractor must submit their offer per the instructions under the RFP, Section 9.0

Mandatory Submissions. The submission must be signed by an official having authority to

contract with MCPS. The firm and official's name shall be used. This solicitation does not

commit the district to pay any costs incurred in the submission of proposals or guarantee that

an award will be made.

In the event of emergency closing of the MCPS Board of Education offices, this RFP will open

at the same time on the next regular working day.

Sincerely,

AMD: se

Angela McIntosh Davis, Director

Department of Procurement

Copy to:

RFP File

Division of Financial Management

MONTGOMERY COUNTY PUBLIC SCHOOLS

Department of Procurement, Suite 3100

45 West Gude Drive

Rockville, Maryland 20850

Request for Proposal #7254.1, Transportation Routing System

1.0 INTENT

Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) is issuing this Request for Proposals (RFP) to solicit

qualified vendors to provide a comprehensive transportation routing system solution and all associated

services. The selected solution will serve as the primary system of record for student transportation

routing across the district and will replace the routing platform currently in use by the Division of

Transportation Services.

The objectives of this procurement are to:

• Acquire a modern, configurable routing platform that supports general education, special education,

vocational, magnet, out-of-district, McKinney-Vento, and mainstreamed student transportation.

• Improve the accuracy and timeliness of routing, scheduling, and reporting through automation,

geographic information system (GIS) integration, and direct interfaces to district systems.

• Provide reliable hosting, strong data security and privacy protections, and clear service-level

commitments.

• Deliver dependable implementation, data conversion, training, and ongoing support, including a

managed transition from the current system.

• Extend timely transportation information to parents, guardians, and school-based staff through

secure portals and a parent application.

• Establish MCPS ownership of its data and a clear path for data portability at the conclusion of any

resulting contract.

2.0 INTRODUCTION

Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) is the 15th largest school system in the United States,

and the largest in the state of Maryland. During the 2025–2026 school year, it is projected that MCPS

will serve more than 156, 000 students from 157 countries speaking 162 languages. With a Fiscal

Year (FY) 2026 Operating Budget of approximately $3.6 billion, MCPS employs more than 25,000

employees. Among the 211 schools that MCPS operates, 39 are National Blue-Ribbon schools. Six

MCPS high schools rank in the top 200 of The Washington Post’s 2015 High School Challenge, and

all 25 MCPS high schools appear on this list, which only includes the top 11 percent of high schools

in the country. MCPS has one of the highest graduation rates among the nation’s largest school

districts, according to an Education Week report. In 2010, MCPS was the recipient of the Malcolm

Baldrige National Quality Award, the highest presidential honor given to American organizations for

performance excellence. The student demographics of MCPS in 2016 are as follows:

RFP 7254.1

Hispanic/Latino: 35.3%

White: 23.9%

Black or African American: 21.6%

Asian: 13.7%

Two or more races: ≤ 5.3%

American Indian or Alaskan Native: ≤0.2%

Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander: ≤0.1%

The Division of Transportation Services, within the Division of District Operations, manages a fleet

of more than 1,300 school buses and provides daily transportation to a large and diverse student

population across Montgomery County and, for certain placements, to locations in the surrounding

Washington, D.C., Maryland, and Virginia (DMV) area.

Routing operations at this scale require a system that can manage complex eligibility rules, hazardous-

road and walk-zone logic, special education and program-based routing, multiple daily and midday

trips, redistricting and boundary planning, and direct data exchange with the district's student

information system and fleet, dispatch, and field trip systems. This RFP and its appendices describe

the functional, technical, security, and service requirements that the proposed solution must meet.

3.0 SCOPE OF SERVICES

The selected Contractor shall provide a complete transportation routing software solution, including

all software, configuration, hosting (as proposed), data conversion, integration, training, maintenance,

and support services necessary to place the solution into full operational use and to sustain it

throughout the contract term. The capabilities summarized in this section are stated in full and itemized

form in Attachment F, Technical Requirements. Offerors shall respond to each requirement in

Attachment F. individually.

3.1 Priorities and Response Convention

Each requirement in the Attachment F. carries a priority of High, Medium, or Low that reflects

MCPS operational need. Priorities are informational and do not limit evaluation; all requirements

are subject to review and scoring. For each requirement, the offeror shall indicate one of the

following: Comply, Comply with Exception, Future Release, or Does Not Comply, and shall

provide a brief explanation, product feature name, or document reference. A response of Comply

means the capability exists today in the proposed release. Responses of Comply with Exception or

Future Release must be fully explained, including any target availability date.

3.2 Routing - General Functionality

The solution shall provide a comprehensive routing engine capable of creating and maintaining

routes for all MCPS student populations and programs. At a minimum, the solution shall:

RFP 7254.1

• Analyze non-eligibility and walk zones for each school based on district criteria, with walk-

distance eligibility configurable as a rule by school level (for example, elementary one mile,

middle one and one-half miles, high two miles);

• Create and maintain special education, vocational, out-of-district, multiple-school drop-off, and

McKinney-Vento (homeless) routing, including cross-district placements, without

workarounds;

• Support routing of mainstreamed students across multiple schools on the same day in a defined

sequence, school pairing, and ride-throughs;

• Provide role-based access rights, including a depot-level permission that lets depots manage

general education routes, including Pre-Kindergarten, while protecting special education routes,

and fine-grained view, edit, and print controls, including function-level security for the map;

• Run what-if scenarios, such as bell-time or bus-capacity changes, against a copy of production

data; and

• Support a nine-digit unique student identifier, a separate family or household identifier, and

printing or export of maps to a variety of printer and plotter types.

The full set of general functionality requirements is provided in Attachment F.

3.3 Routing - Map Functionality

The solution shall provide an interactive, map-based routing environment that supports concurrent

editing, automated optimization, and manual control. At a minimum, the solution shall:

• Allow multiple users to view and edit routes simultaneously, with map edits governed by user-

based security, and allow users to view all students and all routes and stops serving a school or

program at once;

• Provide point-and-click rerouting, street-network distance measurement, editable turn-by-turn

directions, and per-route adjustment of speeds, stop times, and load times without affecting

other routes;

• Support automated optimization along definable criteria, such as reducing the number of routes,

loads, time, or miles, with the ability to revert to manual assignment, and automated ranging

that assigns new students to the nearest stop;

• Provide capacity tools that define each bus type and its capacity, including wheelchair positions,

wheelchair riders seated in seats, and additional staff on board, and that alert the user and

prevent further routing when capacity or equipment limits are exceeded;

• Maintain calendars for the standard school year and summer school, including holidays, early-

release days, and non-public school schedules, and support differing schedules by day and by

school;

• Support in-house bulk street and address edits, new streets and developments, attendance-zone

redistricting and boundary planning, and route-level audit logging stamped with user and time

of change; and

RFP 7254.1

• Support multiple addresses per student, dual bus assignments, A and B schedules, overlapping

midday trips on different days, and stop coding for side of street and unsafe streets.

The full set of map functionality requirements is provided in Attachment F.

3.4 Geographic Information System (GIS) Mapping

The solution shall provide robust GIS capabilities suitable for a large, hazard-aware routing

operation. At a minimum, the solution shall encode hazardous roads so that students are not routed

across them on foot, apply hazard rules by grade level, and encode transportation attributes such as

one-way streets, travel speeds, no-travel roads, bridges, railroad crossings, restricted roads, and

vehicle-size and turn restrictions that are enforced automatically. The solution shall maintain

compatibility with the Esri ArcGIS platform, allow MCPS staff to load county-maintained Esri

centerlines and addresses without vendor intervention, provide surrounding DMV-area county

maps for out-of-area students with out-of-county reporting, and support a satellite imagery overlay.

3.5 System Integrations and Interfaces

The solution shall integrate with the district's information systems through manual import and

export, application programming interfaces (APIs), or prefabricated or custom connectors, with

scheduled automation for data refresh. At a minimum, the solution shall:

• Exchange enrollment, demographic, and transportation data with the Synergy student

information system, including updates to the Synergy parent portal and ParentVUE, and

authenticate MCPS users against Active Directory with support for Single Sign-On;

• Provide an API for data integrations and for in-house reporting and dashboard creation;

• Integrate with the Transportation Information Management System (TIMS) and with fleet

management data (for example, FASTER Web), including route-change alerts to the TIMS

group, with the fleet data source to be confirmed during implementation;

• Pair with global positioning system (GPS) software, such as Samsara, for vehicle tracking and

for the use of traffic patterns to refine pickup and drop-off times;

• Interface the field trip billing component with Oracle Cloud Business Hub for accounts

receivable and general ledger posting; and

• Share data, as appropriate, with Synergy, TIMS, the fleet management system, and the field trip

management database.

3.6 Reporting, Dashboards, and Data

The solution shall provide comprehensive, self-service reporting and data capabilities. The solution

shall reproduce the information contained in current MCPS reports, including Bus Summary and

Detail, editable Parent Letters for the Extended School Year and Current School Year, Student

Record, Route and Trip Detail and Summary, arrival and departure schedules for Special Education,

General Education, and Magnet programs, manifests, and student lists with census information. Bus

reports shall include route number, vehicle identifier, Transportation Cluster Manager or Bus Route

Supervisor, Router, Driver or Attendant, parking space number, and revised or saved dates.

This is the opportunity summary page. It provides an overview of this opportunity and a preview of the attached documentation.

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Transportation Routing System

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See also