Board discusses new bus plans

The Perry County District 32 School Board focused much of its latest meeting on one prominent and crucial topic.
The board discussed at length the issues surrounding the buses and transportation and believe they have come up with a viable solution.
The district declared a “State of Emergency” in September concerning a shortage of bus drivers and will combat the problem with the plan discussed at the meeting Oct. 12.
The district have combined several current routes and will now have 23 total. (19 regular and four special education routes).
The new plan will eliminate three routes in total.
With the new plan, the longest route will be 108 miles for the day, while most consist of 70-80 miles. The current longest route was 86 miles. Several board members were amazed at the mileages of some of the longer routes, but it was noted that the drive time should be about the same of just over an hour. The average amount of time for a route is three hours for one day.
“Part of the reason for that longest route is that it gets on Highway 61 with no stops,” Perry County Superintendent Andy Comstock said. “Part of the route is just straight driving, so the route time should be similar.”
There are currently a few drivers that have two routes in the morning. They will do one route, drop those kids off at school, then return to the road and do another route. Perry County Schools Director of Transportation Sarah Orf noted that the new plan will elimination most of those problems, but they will still have one such instance. Most out-of-town routes will not have in-town stops and vice versa.
“We will still have one,” Orf said. “The route is in town, but right now we aren’t exactly sure which route we would double up. They would be shorter routes. We would start the first at 6:30-7a.m. and the next from 7-7:30 a.m. so that no students are late to school.”
Orf noted that she would like to start the new routes as soon as possible, but noted that there is still some work to do. Orf noted that there will be at least two drivers with completely new routes.
“We have to do all the route descriptions for drivers and recreate all the rosters in order for them to know who is on each bus and drivers need to be able to drive their routes and get times for each stop and parents need to be notified of these times and stops.”

Orf hopes this plan will be temporary.
“This makes our buses have more students on each route,” Orf said. “That would depend on the hiring situation to the point where we would have enough drivers to add routes back in.”
There are enough drivers to have two substitutes if needed, and Orf noted that the district is looking at bringing in at least two new drivers currently.
“This problem is not specific to us,” Comstock said,” How we handle the problem is specific to us.”
Orf wants to have the new routes in place in two weeks.
Within the change in bus routes, the board also took a look at the bus driver salary schedule.
“Our current salary schedule looks more at the route and less at the driver, who may be coming in with experience,” Comstock said.
The current salary is a flat rate of $55 with 0.35 cents for mileage for routes more than 20 miles.
“We want to honor the experience of the bus driver,” Comstock said. “My uncle James at 30 years of driving a truck and came in at the bottom. He made the lowest amount per hour and had the longest route at that time. What we are trying to do is making a system that is more driver focused. I think it will be easier to attract more experienced drivers that way.”
Comstock will soon present a salary plan to the drivers once he knows the miles and route times of the new routes.
“I think once we get the drivers into the seats they will fall in love with what they are doing,” he said. “Our job is to get them in that seat first.”
The next meeting will be held Nov. 9