The Marysville School District is hoping to never again see a day like Aug. 29, 2023.
That day encapsulated the constantly fluid busing situation within the district that has forced supervisors to find on-the-fly solutions to issues created by a driver shortage.
“If I had to do it (Aug. 29) over again, I would say we can’t do it,” Marysville Director of Operations Ryan Walker said, meaning canceling school might have been the better option.
At a special meeting last week, board of education members had agreed, in principle, to a plan that would adjust start and end times within the various school buildings. That time would have given bus drivers more time to complete routes.
The board had intended to vote on the changes at Thursday night’s regular monthly meeting, but additional turbulence within the transportation department, just since last week’s meeting, threw a wrench into that timeline.
In a perfect world, the district would have 34 bus routes and 34 drivers with a handful of substitutes. Administrators scramble almost every day to ensure all of the district’s 29 routes are covered, but some days are worse than others.
Despite squeezing students into a reduced number of routes, the district is currently struggling with six contracted drivers out on approved leaves of absence, with another set to go on leave soon.
On Aug. 29, the district had no substitute drivers available and was dealing with call-offs, the last of which came in at 3:45 a.m. Walker said the end result was three district routes being unaccounted for at 4 a.m.
At this point the district had to decide whether to cancel school or try to complete the rerouting process in 90 minutes. During a weather-related cancellation, the decision is typically made by 5:30 a.m. and officials had hoped to work with a similar deadline.
As if finding a way to shuffle three buses worth of students onto other routes wasn’t challenging enough, there was also a special-needs bus without a driver and those students can’t simply be folded into another route, according to Walker.
The deadline of 5:30 a.m. passed and the rerouting was not completed. By 6:05 a.m. some of the drivers collaborated on a plan to absorb one of the routes and five minutes later a little-used substitute driver answered the call to cover a second route.
Just before the traditional start time for the final uncovered route, the district was bailed out by another substitute driver who does not typically work for the district.
“The short of it is that, in