Barber says 3-tier busing stays; Two-tier discussed for 2014-15

By LENNY C. LEPOLA

News Assis­tant Man­ag­ing Editor

Dur­ing the Feb­ru­ary Big Wal­nut Local School Dis­trict Board of Edu­ca­tion meet­ing, dis­trict Assis­tant Super­in­ten­dent Gary Bar­ber raised the issue of 2013–14 school year bell times. Those bell times deter­mine the district’s trans­porta­tion sched­ule – one-tier, two-tier, or three-tier busing.

In a one-tier bus­ing model all dis­trict schools start up and end their days at the same time, requir­ing the most buses on the road at the same time. In a two-tier sys­tem the dis­trict has two start and end bell times, allow­ing dri­vers to ser­vice one school’s bell times and then another’s, result­ing in fewer buses on the road and lower costs to the dis­trict in both fleet and personnel.

The dis­trict moved to three-tier bus­ing at the start of the cur­rent school year, three dif­fer­ent bell times were estab­lished for build­ing startup and release times. Big Wal­nut High School and Big Wal­nut Mid­dle School cur­rently start their days at 7:35 a.m. and stu­dents are released at 2:25 p.m. Big Wal­nut Inter­me­di­ate School starts at 9:10 a.m. and releases stu­dents at 4 p.m. All three dis­trict ele­men­tary build­ings start at 8:25 a.m. and stu­dents are released at 3:15 p.m.

Dur­ing Mon­day evening’s March board meet­ing Bar­ber said the dis­trict would con­tinue using a three-tier bus­ing sys­tem for the 2013–14 school year with slightly tweaked bell times.

Bar­ber said Big Wal­nut High School and Big Wal­nut Mid­dle School would be in ses­sion from 7:30 a.m. to 2 p.m., for 6 hours and 30 min­utes of in school time. All three dis­trict ele­men­tary build­ings will be on an 8:25 a.m. to 3 p.m. sched­ule for 6 hours and 35 min­utes of school time. Big Wal­nut Inter­me­di­ate School’s bell times will be 9:15 a.m. and 3:55 p.m. for 6 hours and 40 min­utes of school time.

Bar­ber also noted that morn­ing kinder­garten would be 8:25 to 10:55 a.m., and after­noon kinder­garten will be 12:25 to 3 p.m.; both have 2 hours and 35 min­utes of class­room time.

“We’re not going to start any ear­lier than we are this year,” Bar­ber said. “We’re look­ing at the SAC pro­gram, because many par­ents do not pick sack stu­dents up until 5 or 5:30 p.m. We’re not sure if our SAC is designed for that long of a time. Our other goal is not to reduce instruc­tional time.”

Bar­ber said the dis­trict is explor­ing a num­ber of ways to get back class­room time that will be lost to a tweaked bus sched­ule. Options on the table are adjust­ing the ele­men­tary dis­missal time, dis­con­tin­u­ing the high school’s late start, and adjust­ing the length of spe­cials, Eagle Time, class change time and test­ing procedures.

“None of these are set in stone; it’s things we’ve talked about,” Bar­ber said. “We’re going to chal­lenge our admin­is­tra­tors; we’re deter­mined that our kids are not going to lose class­room time.”

As an added note, Bar­ber and dis­trict trans­porta­tion super­vi­sor Ron McClure rec­om­mended that board mem­bers start con­sid­er­ing return­ing to a two-tier bus sys­tem in the 2014–15 school year because of the pos­si­bil­ity of open­ing another ele­men­tary building.

Bar­ber said a two-tier sys­tem would have high school, mid­dle school and inter­me­di­ate school 7:50 a.m. and 2:35 p.m. bell times; dis­trict ele­men­tary build­ings would oper­ate with 8:50 a.m. and 3:35 bell times. All dis­trict build­ings would return to 6 hours and 45 min­utes of school time.

Dur­ing the Feb­ru­ary board meet­ing Bar­ber said the added cost of mov­ing to a two-tier sys­tem would be two new buses at $75,000 each or $150,000, and an addi­tional $100,000 in oper­a­tion costs.

He also said two-tier bus­ing would force the dis­trict to make dou­ble runs. Dou­ble runs would involve some indi­vid­ual buses doing two pick-up routes and two drop-off routes each day for a spe­cific build­ing, cre­at­ing stu­dent super­vi­sion concerns.

“The dou­ble runs could be elim­i­nated with four addi­tional buses for $300,000 and $200,000 more in oper­at­ing costs,” Bar­ber said in February.

Bar­ber said noth­ing is set in stone for the 2014–15 school year; that any 2014–15 bus­ing and related bell time deci­sion is one year out.

Posted by Gary Henery on Mar 13 2013. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.