FirstView Classic

First Student Inc.

About this app

Designed with parents, for parents – FirstView®, powered by First Student, makes you a part of your student’s journey. To school. From school. Every day.

FirstView® is your resource for knowing the location of your student’s bus, estimated arrival times at your student’s stop and when your student’s bus arrives or departs their school. FirstView® is a partnership between First Student and the school districts we serve, bringing increased transparency and communication about the school bus for students and their families. Currently, FirstView® is only available to a small number of school districts but we are working hard to offer it to as many districts as possible! Please contact your school district or our FirstView® support team if you would like to know if FirstView® is available for you.

Dedicated Customer Support
• Contact FirstView® Monday – Friday by:
- Calling the toll-free phone number 888-889-8920 from 7:00 a.m. EST to 5:00 p.m. EST;
- Emailing Customer Support at [e-mail]; or
- Using the in-app messaging to provide feedback.

Live Tracking
• The FirstView® map screen shows you the live location and direction of your student’s bus, your student's stop schedule for the current day and timestamps for school arrivals and departures.

Predictive Stop Arrival Times
• Analyzing route and real-time GPS data, we determine an estimated time of arrival to your stop provided on the FirstView® map.

Custom Alerts and Messages
• Set up push or email notifications alerting you when your student's bus is a chosen distance or number of minutes away from your stop.
• Receive push messages about why your student’s bus is late and an estimation of how long it will be delayed.

Multi-Stop View
• Buses for all your students can be tracked with FirstView®. Using individual colors for each student, every selected stop appears on the map simultaneously for easy viewing and differentiation.

Additional User Notifications
• The main user of the FirstView® app can connect three additional email accounts to receive email alerts.

Secure and Easy Access
• FirstView® requires a password-protected account along with your student’s ID for app set-up. This way, only you can view your student’s stop.
• Register and log-in from your smartphone, tablet or desktop.

Ratings and reviews

The app is not very accurate. It shows the bus is a couple blocks away from my son's stop, but it's driving up to his stop. I wish it was more accurate, so on cold days, I'm not sending my son out too early or too late. Today, he almost missed the bus bc the app showed me it was 5 blocks away, but it wasn't. It was driving up our street towards his bus stop. It's a great app to have, esp during the winter, but it needs to be accurate with location.

The tracking on the app is spot on for us. However, the notifications and ETA don't work quite right. The ETA is a generic time that never changes based on the location of the bus. The time notifications work based on that ETA and not the bus location. However, besides this, it works great and support is incredibly helpful.

This app mostly does what it says although it vary rarely handles half days correctly (that might be a district reporting issue). However, the login process should be reworked. The login credentials expire way too frequently for an app like this and when logging in you're forced to first scroll through the states and towns to find your district. That should only be needed when adding bus routes. If the login was first, my saved routes would load and district selecting wouldn't be needed.

What’s new

FirstView Classic is available for any First Student yellow bus parent whose school district has been utilizing the bus tracking product prior to the 2024-2025 School Year.
This update includes:

• Fixed an issue for two schools with the same name and same stops causing incorrect trip tracking.

If you experience any app issues or have feedback, contact us at [e-mail]