Schools across North America continue to struggle with finding enough bus drivers to handle all their routes. Districts are increasingly cutting routes, despite the major problems that causes for parents and for the traffic situation around school drop-off points.
However, there's another alternative to consider, especially for larger districts supporting a large number of individual schools: adjusting bell times. In short: if you don't have enough buses to get all your kids to school at the same time, start staggering bell times so that your buses can run multiple routes each day.
Correcting and Adjusting Bell Times Can Improve Bus Efficiency
Changing your bell times requires a lot of thought and planning. Every district's optimal strategy will be different. However, we can offer a couple potential scenarios:
1 - Different bell times for different age groups
Researchers already recommend having later school start times for teenagers, which improves attendance and attention, and may even reduce traffic accidents. So many districts are looking at having significantly different start times, spaced as much as an hour apart, for different cohorts.
Basically - as one example - if your elementary starts at 8:00, your MS starts at 8:30, and your HS starts at 9:00, that potentially gives your drivers time to do three routes in the morning. This effectively triples your bus capacity.
2 - Geographical grouping
Another option would be to look at where all your students are, and build routes around that. Buses don't focus on delivering to a single school, but rather picking up students from several different schools which are all within a few miles of each other, with bell times adjusted to match.
This can be complicated to work out and definitely requires good school bus routing software, but could be a viable option for districts that are especially low on bus drivers. You'll probably need to assign minders to each bus, however, to ensure students get off at the right schools in the morning.
No matter how you implement this, remember to keep parents in the loop and fully informed about the changes. They'll have to update their schedules too.
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PRESIDENT
Sonia has been involved with BusBoss since the late 1990’s, and has personally overseen many projects for various customers ranging from large urban and suburban districts to smaller rural school districts from all over the country.