When finalizing a bell schedule to provide additional flexibility for the bussing program, Marysville School officials settled on one that favored families over peak functionality.
Following months of meeting with a community task force one the issue, the Marysville Board of Education voted Thursday night to implement a plan that considered parental feedback collected from surveys and public meetings.
“We needed to prioritize the experience of the students and the families,” Director of Operations Ryan Walker told the board.
A mid-year bell schedule change, coupled with success in bus driver recruitment, helped alleviate habitually late bus routes throughout the district. Even so, district and task force officials felt that more could be done to curb lingering problems such as long bus rides and students, as young as elementary age, being forced to make multiple bus switches each day.
Walker explained that the task force used the current bell schedule as a jumping off point and found that many of the persistent issues centered around one school.
“We were just kind of getting jammed up at Creekview (Intermediate School),” Walker said of the building that serves fifth and sixth graders.
The task force eventually settled on two models that would help eliminate snags while providing more buffer time within the routes.
Both models had identical pick-up and drop-off times for high school and middle school students, with high schoolers being picked up earliest followed by Bunsold students. Both plans also had high school students and middle schoolers riding on separate buses.
One of the models had elementary students transported next and finished with Creekview. The other option had that order reversed.
Because many of the delays materialized at Creekview, task force members felt the model with the intermediate school at the end of the order made the most sense. This model would keep delays at Creekview from trickling down and impacting elementary routes.
The Creekview-last plan also allowed six additional buses to help serve intermediate school routes, while the other option only freed up three buses.
“If you’re a student, either one of these was going to dramatically benefit you,” Walker said, also noting that the drivers seemed to feel good about the potential changes.
What became clear was that parents did not agree with the feelings of the task force.
“To be quite honest the majority of the feedback did address the elementary start time and the Creekview sequencing,” Walker told the board.
He said the district received about 280 responses to a survey asking for feedback on the two plans and there was “overwhelming” support for the plan with the elementary school students serviced last.
Walker said the concerns from parents centered around elementary students being home alone, 40 minutes before older siblings at Creekview. Other concerns center around finding childcare for young students, who would be let out of school at 3:15 p.m. each day.
“You have to look at what is an appropriate disruption for the amount of gain we think we’ll get,” Walker said.
Ultimately, he recommended the elementary-last plan that would have Creekview dismissed at 3:15 p.m. and the elementaries let out at 3:55 p.m. The board voted 5-0 to adopt the recommended plan for the 2024/25 school year. (A full list of start and dismissal times can be found in the graphic accompanying this story.)
Despite the unanimous support for the plan, board members still peppered Walker with questions about the new schedule.
Board member Matt Keller asked if parents would still be encouraged to transport students to school, like they were for the current school year. Walker said he did not anticipate making that request of parents, based on the hiring of additional drivers and refinement of the bus schedule.
Keller also questioned if the new routing would increase miles being driven, creating an additional cost. Walker said the separation of high school and middle school routes would no doubt lead to increased mileage, but he did not anticipate large duplication of routes.
Board member Jermaine Ferguson questioned the need to change the existing bell schedule if the district has gotten its driver staffing levels up to appropriate levels. Walker said the driver shortage just revealed the shortcoming of the previous system, that it was built around uneven distribution of a much smaller student population.
“It (the driver shortage) just sort of exposed what our problem was,” Walker said. “The system itself collapsed underneath us.”
Ferguson said that he had concerns that fixing the system resulted in the shortening of the school day in some buildings by five minutes. He said this is poor timing because the district is still trying to come back from the pandemic lag and now finds itself with larger class sizes because of a hiring freeze.
Assistant Superintendent Jonathan Langhals said even with the five minutes of reduced time each day, the district elementaries are will still be 27 days above the required state minimum instruction time. Superintendent Diane Allen said parents did provide feedback that reducing the school day was acceptable to help with the bussing issue, given that the district exceeded state minimums.