Transportation
I wanted to share some information regarding transportation. It's not a secret that there are many job openings all over, in all industries. We currently are short about 50+ drivers for our district. As a domino effect of this, it causes our district to either combine runs or to create double and triple runs, which in turn delays students from arriving at school or at home. I am asking you to have some patience. The transportation department is working tirelessly to find solutions for this.
I'm sure some of you are asking why didn't they plan for this over the summer? Well, it's not quite that easy. We have families enrolling all summer long, and we have some families that don't enroll until now. It takes a lot of planning to add bus stops to routes and account for students who move into different areas. In some cases a bus could be 1/2 full one week, and then when enrollments happen and additional students are added a bus could go to over crowded. What I do know is that it is being tackled.
Some of the hiccups we encountered this week are simply bus numbers. Because we have gone from 1000 students to about 650 we've had a reduction in buses. We've gone from 20 buses to 11. However, most of our drivers are exactly the same from last year, but their routes have been changed just a little. Which means if you rode bus A last year you might think you are riding A again, but you are really on bus B. That is why we've had to double check all of the routes with our kids this year. I do appreciate your patience with this. I'm sure it's not the only obstacle that we will need to hurdle this year, especially with worker shortages and state and federal mandates, but I do know that anything is possible. We will persevere.
I do want to commend the district, specifically the transportation department for trying to maintain transportation options. My understanding is that many other large districts experiencing the same issues are just canceling routes and leaving transportation up to families. I can only imagine the burden that this would be for many of our families. I will continue to keep you updated with any information that I receive, and we will continue to send all call's home to families as buses roll out later than anticipated.
My goal is to get our kids loaded and off the campus by about 3:50 / 3:55 next week if there are no delayed buses or double runs. We will inform you if there are.
