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School Transportation Operations and Private Vendor Bid

At a glance

Based on auto-generated captions; names and numbers may be misheard.

  • What: the transportation director and assistant director updated the subcommittee on school bus operations after a rough start to the school year.
  • Scale: about 7,600 students are transported (including students at non-district schools), about 1,700 of them special education. The fleet is 58 large buses, 58 short vans, six wheelchair vans and six small passenger vans, with three more small vans arriving by the end of October and two by the end of November, expected to save at least about 1,750 dollars a day by replacing private vendors on some routes. Seven vehicles were out of service (one large bus, one more large bus issue, three vans with transmission trouble), all past warranty.
  • Private vendors: an invitation for bids for the 77 private routes (serving three schools, in groups of five) is planned for October 26, requiring GPS trackers, interior and exterior cameras, two-way radios, zero tolerance for misroutes, a call to parents when more than five minutes late, and identifying vests. Vendors found with a cracked windshield or expired sticker have been removed; monthly spot inspections and random checks are planned.
  • Technology: a "where is the bus" pilot works but exposed a data link problem between the student information system and the routing software; door-to-door vans are not in it yet. The chair wants student scan-on-the-bus tablets. Radios have dead spots being worked on. The operations manual is being updated.
  • Requests from members: weekly fuel costs (fuel was about 4 dollars a gallon), how many buses are down, and the mileage on older vans to judge repair versus replace.

Sources

Log