Hello.
My name is Darin Roberts. I am a Pastor of Children's Ministries at Highest Praise Family Church.
Currently we run three busses every Sunday Morning and Wednesday night, bringing in 50+ kids per bus per service. To keep track of these kids, we have a hard-copy route sheet (maintained in
excel)listing stop #, Kids Names, Address, Phone, and the pick-up and take home times. After church, we load the kids up, then attempt to verify that all the kids are back aboard. On the Wednesday nights, the reload is a nightmare, as we are loading
in the dark at 8:30 PM, 55+ kids packed wall to wall, and all wanting to go to sleep, or home to do homework, and talking to friends at full volume.
I had an idea of buying some tablet PCs or I pads, and finding an attendance app.
The idea would be to have the route list display on the pad, and as a child loads on the pick up run, we could tap on the child's name and it would highlight it. It would also be entered into
a database for attendance, PLUS added to a "Reload List". The app would also need to have a way to tap on an empty space under the names listed at each stop so we could add friends who visit, letting us know where they got on so we know where to
take them home after church. So when you tap the empty space, an input window with fields for name, address, phone#, and birthday would pop up. Lastly, when it is time to go home, we could pull up the "Reload list" which would list all those
who loaded Alphabetically by First name (a lot of our younger kids don't know theirs...) and tap them off the list as they reload, so when we are done, any names listed would be the kids we need to go hunting for.
I know nothing about programing, have only used pad systems acouple of times, so I have NO concept of how to do this. Ijust know Apps are usually simple to use and tend to be far more intuitive than
standard IBM systems, so figured this would be a great fix.
As we are a donation based ministry, I also have NO funds to pay someone to do this, but we can give a charitable donation letter for any reasonable market value.
If you can possibly help me with this, I would trulyappreciate it. If not you, maybe you might know someone who can.
Darin Roberts
Children's Pastor
kidpreacher.org
727-809-0926
