(NewsNation) — A school district in upstate New York staggered its school day in order to make sure it has enough bus drivers to take every kid home at a reasonable time, but it’s been a trial-and-error process.
The solution was born of a problem the district encountered right after the COVID-19 pandemic. The Niagara Falls City School District had always needed around 80 bus drivers in order to serve its student population.
“When we came back that September, we were working off of exactly half: 40,” the district’s superintendent, Mark Laurrie, said.
The sudden shortage forced the district to triage its remaining drivers in order to serve all of its students in 2021, but it learned the right adjustments were a moving target.
At first, the district prioritized getting the elementary school students home earlier. The drivers would then come back to get the high schoolers later in the afternoon.
But some high schoolers had to wait up to two hours after dismissal for a ride home, and schools reported fights and other problems while students waited.
So about 10 weeks after the initial change, the district decided to change schedules again in order to get everyone home at a reasonable time.
This time, it shaved 30 minutes off of high school schedules and released them early.
“It was born out of really the fact that we didn’t see, despite many options to try to increase the numbers of drivers, we were getting one or two more which wasn’t going to make a difference,” he said of why the district decided to make the switch.
That change brought unanticipated issues as well. While this change made it easier for the smaller number of drivers to get kids home more quickly, it also took a toll on instructional time.
“When you add that up over the course of the 30 weeks remaining, certainly adds up to a lot of minutes,” Laurrie said.
Laurrie said while the district experimented with the shifting times, it became apparent it needed to get the high school kids home first, not the elementary students.
The school started facing complaints from employers about kids being unable to get to their part-time jobs on time. The younger kids faced their own challenges.
“The reason why the elementary buses were getting back to high school so late is because many of the kids couldn’t get off the bus. They were waiting for their high school siblings to get home to watch them. I never anticipated that,” Laurrie said.
Going into this school year, the district has shifted schedules again. Elementary schools release at 3:20 PM while middle schools release at 2:30 PM and high schools release at 2:35 PM.
This way, the district didn’t need to cut any instructional time to stagger the school schedules, adding the elementary schoolers actually get a little bit more time in school.
Laurrie said that with that extra time, the younger students are getting more physical education, arts, and music with the additional time.
The district continues to face a shortage of bus drivers; it’s sitting at around 48 currently. While the schedule is helping kids get home at a reasonable hour, Laurrie argued there would still be some benefits to achieving better staffing for the bus driver fleet.
“What we would be able to do is have more efficient bus runs and fewer students on each run,” he said, noting that school buses usually see more problems among kids if there are too many kids on a bus.