School Bus Transportation (home, established neighborhood, live in)

[beachbum98]

We've been having a bit of an ordeal with our bus transportation for our 1st grader. They get out of school at 3:00 and usually get home by 3:10 (we live a couple of minutes from the school). Well, apparently they're short bus drivers and are having to double up on routes, so essentially, one bus driver takes one route home, comes back and gets another one. They just let us know that now my son's route won't be leaving the school until 3:30 every day. That just seems crazy to me that the kids have to sit around for 30 minutes waiting for a bus. Is that normal? I'm tempted to just go get him so he doesn't have to wait around every day, but I've got a napping toddler at that time and a new baby on the way, so it's much easier to have him take the bus home.

[byebyenortheast]

We've had days in the past 2 weeks where my children had to wait 45 minutes after school for similar reasons. This week is was back to normal Mon-Wed. But today we were back to the delay.

We called the school and they referred us to the transportation department. When we call them we continually get an answering machine with "Due to increased call volume...".

HEY!!!! Maybe that newly elected board is onto something with wanting to reduce busing!!!!!

[twingles]

We went thru that in the beginning of the year. We were NOT happy that our kids were waiting out in the hot, blazing 95 degree heat waiting for the bus to come back. And my kids were in shock, after moving here from a district in NY where they treat the kids like gold, LOL. All I can tell you is the squeaky wheel gets the grease, because everyone in my neighborhood complained - but apparently they had been thru this before and knew who to call, and quickly, so this only lasted a couple of days. I live in a pretty established neighborhood with lots of parents who know the "lay of the land" down here, so that helped.

I'll add that you should research where else this bus is going - I'm pretty sure that my bus was taking kids to a neighborhood that really shouldn't be getting busing (it's like a half mile from school) and that's always a card you could play although you'd be screwing other people out of their bus. But with a bus shortage, they should really be enforcing the limits for walkers.

Our bus driver just retired, so this situation is not going to be remedied soon....I don't know why they can't get or keep drivers in this economy, honestly. It's a real head scratcher to me.