March 11, 2025
Bear Families,
We recently held our final Transportation Advisory Group meeting this past week. The group is made up of parents, Board members, transportation administrators, building administrators, and central office administrators.
The purpose of this advisory group is to discuss our current state of transportation, anticipated needs, and potential solutions based on those needs. We formed the group after working through the issues that presented themselves last school year in regard to the statewide driver shortage.
The good news for us right now is that our recruitment efforts are working and we look to be able to keep the same approach in place for the 2025-2026 school year. If we have more retirements/resignations than expected, that could change, but we are in a good place based on what we currently know.
The committee has taken a long look at school start times, as we know that some adjustments in our times would potentially help the elementary traffic issue. We know that if we can get all of the buses to the elementary prior to student dismissal, we would eliminate a good amount of the traffic that exists at the end of the day. A change in school start times would certainly help.
At this time, we have decided to keep the school start times the same for the 2025-2026 school year, but expect to see some adjustments in those times for the 2026-2027 school year. We feel that we need more time to work through some of the logistics before we can confidently make adjustments to times. Our plan is to start communicating the changes for the 2026-2027 school year early on during the 2025-2026 school year so everyone has ample time to plan accordingly.
The exact changes in time have not yet been determined, but we will start communicating that early next year once we have them set.
Again, we believe this will have a positive impact on the elementary school dismissal process. We also believe that, if we ever experience a shortage of drivers again, it will be a necessary change to address that issue as well.
We appreciate the hard work of our group as we explored the different options. It is a much more complicated puzzle than it appears, but we feel like there are some adjustments we can make to improve our situation.
It will always be our goal to provide transportation to all who need it. Continuing to recruit and retain drivers, evaluate service options and make these types of adjustments gives us the best chance to make that happen.
Thank you,
Mike Laub
Superintendent