# University will read a full roll at every intercampus shuttle stop

> A School of Continuous Improvement paper finds that calling the roll at each pole stop of a walking school bus makes no difference to when the group reaches the school gate, and the University adopts the called roll for its own shuttle.

From the first teaching period after publication, the driver of every intercampus shuttle will read the day's roll aloud at each stop, and a stop will be entered as closed when the last name has been called. The practice comes from "The Pole-Stop Roll Call as Punctuality Device", a paper released today by the School of Continuous Improvement, which follows the volunteer coordinators of 28 walking school bus routes through a term of alternating practice.

> A roll is a way of paying attention to everyone who is present, and a school morning is a good place to see it done. We came away having learned a good deal about attention, and not much about the clock.
>
> --- Dr Marit Osayande, Lecturer and Convenor, Living Dashboard

The paper, by Dr Osayande with Dr Thandiwe Solberg and Edda Nwafor, sets the school-run ritual beside the schedule it is thought to serve. Each route took turns at reading its roll at the pole and leaving it unread, with the arrival of the group at the gate noted to the minute throughout. Groups reached the gate at the same time under both practices, whether the card was held by an adult or by a child, and across routes of every length.

The University has welcomed the result as a reason to adopt the practice, since a roll that costs the morning nothing is a roll it can afford to keep. The shuttle roll will cover the day's registered riders in alphabetical order by family name, with no exemption for a stop at which nobody is waiting. Dr Solberg said the coordinators "kept their cards tidy and their mornings unhurried throughout".

The full paper is available from the University's research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.mqg1vf.