HOWARD – East Knox Local Schools has tightened its bus riding policy in response to bus driver shortages, the district announced in a Facebook post on Tuesday.
In the new policy, students are only permitted one pick-up and one drop-off location starting this school year. These can be two different locations, and shared parenting rules (which accommodate students with divorced parents who both live within the district) will still be followed per state law.
While the district said in the post that it will be willing to make additional accommodations, such as emergency pick-up or drop-off changes, “exceptions should be few.”
Under the previous policy, students had the option of being dropped off at a third location, along with the pick-up and drop-off locations. Parents could also request their student be dropped off or picked up at different locations depending on the day of the week.
The district was also more lenient with last-second location change requests, district transportation supervisor Angela Wells said during Thursday’s Board of Education meeting.
“I mean, we are the yellow taxi cab service,” Wells told the board. “And any time anybody calls, we usually… you know, because usually when they call it’s an emergency, it’s this or that. And we have always accommodated everybody.”
These accommodations became too much for a short-staffed fleet, as students would consistently move back and forth between buses, causing confusion and overpopulation issues for bus drivers.
“When kids are moving back and forth between buses, we don’t always have seats for all of them,” superintendent Steve Larcomb said.
Larcomb said the district had called and emailed parents about the changes Tuesday night and that they will be detailed in a newsletter sent out late next week.
He said Wednesday morning that since notifying parents of the changes on Tuesday, he had not received any phone calls or feedback. The Facebook post had six comments, but none voiced concerns over the issue.
While the school board would not need to formally vote on this policy change, as district administration is ultimately responsible for reworking policy, Wells brought the issue to the board last Thursday to make members aware of potential policy changes.
The board debated the issue for 45 minutes.
Wells began by presenting the board with a box full of parent request slips that were just from the last six months of the school year.
As she removed the stacks of blue and pink slips from the box and placed them on the table in front of the board, she explained how the district’s former policy allowed parents to submit forms to have a students’ pick-up or drop-off location changed. These forms were filled out every day by school secretaries, Wells said, and things had gotten to the tipping point.
“It’s gotten out of hand,” she said.
Wells said the district has consistently accommodated parents and students when it comes to request forms, but doing so has become a liability and safety issue for the district.
Many parents would request that students be transported to different houses or bus stops depending on the day of the week, which had become hard to track for drivers because students would rarely ride the same bus every day, Wells said.
She also noted that sometimes children wouldn’t know which house or stop they were going to on a particular day, which would lead to a phone call home from the bus driver that wouldn’t always get answered, causing further complications for the student and driver.
The daily shuffling of pick-up and drop-off locations caused headaches for Wells and the bus drivers in trying to get the numbers right on each bus.
“Not all my buses are full and packed, but it seems like wherever these children end up going, that’s the full bus,” Wells told the board.
Wells emphasized that to this point, the district consistently went out of its way to respond to last-second location transfer requests, although she believes that some district residents had abused the system.
“It’s probably mostly our fault because a lot of people don’t usually turn anybody down. And usually when they call, you know, it sounds like a legitimate reason,” Wells said. “I’m sure not all of them are, because they want us to do whatever they need done. But I don’t know, I just feel like they’re taking advantage of us.
Larcomb added Thursday that the district’s previous policy had turned dangerous when students became confused over where they were supposed to be dropped off after school.
“We had an incident a couple years ago where the driver that day, a kid got on the bus and thought he was supposed to go home, but that was the day he was going over to grandma’s house or wherever. But we had a substitute driver on the route – he doesn’t know any better,” he recalled.
“Little kid gets on the bus and starts headed for the house – nobody’s home, no key, no way to get in. Mind you, it was decent weather. But a neighbor happened to be out working in the yard, saw the little fella get off the bus and head for the house, knew his parents weren’t home and waved at the driver and said, ‘Hey!’ The driver called in and sure enough, they weren’t home and he was supposed to go somewhere else. So really, by the grace of God, we averted a potential problem that day.”
Wells said that most of the issues with the former policy concerned elementary school students, as high school students typically need less supervision after school.
While three of the five school board members seemed to agree with Wells’ proposal on Thursday, board vice president Derrick Steinmetz opposed it.
Steinmetz, who has children in the East Knox school system, argued that kids will often have different schedules every day because of after school activities and that parents sometimes simply cannot be there to meet their kid at the door when the bus takes them home from school.
“I guess I’m just very sensitive to this because I have kids in sports, we live a busy life, and one of the things that’s been nice is to be able to have a note and say, ‘Please take my 13-year-old and drop him off somewhere – it could be somewhere with another student who has a mom or dad – so that my 17-year-old isn’t driving 90 miles an hour on Apple Valley Drive like I was at 16,” Steinmetz said.
Board president Dustin Buckingham sided with Steinmetz on the issue, noting that one of the advantages of living in a small community is that bus drivers will often make accommodations to help families. He feared that the district would lose community support if it chose to make the policy change.
After 45 minutes of discussion, the board concluded that the issue came down to one question: How much is the district responsible for its students after school hours?
“I hear what you’re saying,” board member Matt Schwartz told Steinmetz. “But I’m from, I guess, a different era. You have kids you’re responsible for. The school’s responsibility is to educate the children, and to care for them while they’re in our care. I understand all the situations. But at what point is it not our problem?
“At some point in time the parents, the responsibility’s gotta go back to the parents. I know that sounds cold-hearted, but isn’t that a fact? How do we do it?”
Steinmetz countered with an example of a district elementary student who plays football.
“Kids have after school activities that sometimes they do, which is going to change the parameters of where they need to be dropped off at every now and then,” Steinmetz said. “If a kid cannot play or do an after-school activity because his mom or dad is working, I’m not one that’s going to want to look at that mom and say, ‘It’s your kid, you figure it out,’ when she’s saying, I just need you to drop him off somewhere else in the district so that he can get a ride with Billy to somewhere.”
Schwartz responded by going back to the same question: Who is responsible for the child once it leaves school?
“I don’t think it’s our responsibility, representing the taxpayer, whether the kid plays Colt Football or not,” Schwartz said. “Mine is to get an education.”
The board acknowledged at the time that changing the policy might ruffle the feathers of district parents, and Wells said she expects a reaction from the community on the change.
“The first two weeks are probably going to be your roughest two weeks,” she said. “I know it’s not going to be looked on favorably with the parents, just for the fact that we make it really convenient for them”
The board agreed that the district should look into getting an after school program as a potential solution to Steinmetz’s grievances, considering the age group of the students that will be most affected by the new policy change.
