Living Sky School Division will be adding a new bus route to cut down ride times for students coming and going to Maymont School.
Transportation manager Trevor Horton made the recommendation to the school board at their latest meeting Oct. 23. The reason is to alleviate some very long ride times for students.
There are two existing routes going to and from Maymont School, but Horton was reporting that ride times were getting to be extremely long, with students spending three hours on the bus every day.
“It’s been building for a few years now,” Horton said. Last year, he told the board, “we were getting a lot of complaints from families about ride times, and rightly so.”
This year, Maymont School has added a pre-K program, which means even more students needing to be picked up.
What Horton proposed was to add one new route for 13 students, while reducing the length of two existing routes. This would reduce the length of the longer run by 20 minutes one way. It would also allow the school division to be better able to meet their own policy of not picking up students prior to 7:25 a.m. in the morning. Right now they are picking students up as early as 7 a.m. for the current routes.
Money saved paying the third-party carrier by shorting those routes would go towards the new run. It’s estimated the increase to the budget would be $9,000 to accommodate the change. They are looking at using a division-owned bus for the new route.
