After Delays—

Transportation Committee Finalizes Bus Routes

By Eliza Hallabeck

After a missed publication deadline, delays in the school district’s transportation department, and scheduling conflicts among members of the Transportation Committee, the panel finally met this week to go over the finalized bus routes for the coming school year.

Bus routes were scheduled to be published in this week’s edition of The Newtown Bee, but they were not ready in time. Consequently, the routes will published in the August 22 edition of The Bee, just days before the start of school on August 27.

The list of routes was reviewed over the summer, and complications with the computer software that was being used to place students at their bus stops made the process of rerouting for this year’s schedule complex.

During the prior meeting of the Transportation Committee in June, the committee decided to have the bus schedule reviewed because there were problem areas that needed correcting. Some bus drivers were starting routes on the opposite side of town from where they live or from where their bus is stationed. Other problem areas involved bus routes with too many or too few students on them.

“What I’ve done is gone through the routes,” said Transportation Director Tony Dilonardo.

After the school’s transportation department and the technology department went through the bus routes, it was discovered early this week that some of the students were not at bus stops that were appropriate for them. Before the process of looking into the routes began this summer, there were roughly 700 problem stops in the routes.

According to Mr Dilonardo, these problems happened because of a problem in the computer program used to configure the routes, because, he said, there are no computer programs designed for towns with Newtown’s topography. Lillian Bittman, a member of the Board of Education and the Transportation Committee, said the programs for configuring bus routes are designed for either citylike environments or rural areas where there are designated corners and sidewalks. Newtown’s hills and curving roads can not be fully determined by a program that is created to configure routes for other types of areas.

The program, called SASSY, is in its last year, because during the meeting the members announced that another computer program will be taking its place by next year. PowerSchool, which is the next computer program that the transportation department will use to configure bus routes, will be more compatible with other programs already used by the department.

After spending a few days working on through SASSY to fix the bus routes, Mr Dilonardo said he is confident that the final bus routes that have been put together are sound.

Not all of the problem areas were corrected, according to Mr Dilonardo. He said he changed a few that were brought up during the last meeting of the committee, but others were not able to be switched without a larger change to the routes.

The bus drivers and owner/operators will test the routes next week.

“That gives us basically a week to go over the routes before school starts,” said Mr Dilonardo regarding the meeting with the drivers and owner/operators.

Mr Dilonardo also said the only confirmation that the bus routes are working properly will be the first two weeks of school.

The first week of school “really isn’t a true and accurate reflection on the timing [of the bus routes],” said Mr Dilonardo. He said it takes everyone about a week to get into their daily routines, and by the end of the second week the timing is normally reflective of what it will be like for the rest of the year.

Superintendent of Schools Janet Robinson said a couple things will be implemented this year in order to avoid a large scale overhaul of the bus routes again next summer. She said she will oversee that the either the secretaries or the guidance departments at the schools submit information to the transportation department when a student withdraws or transfers out of schools, and this will help to keep the bus routes up-to-date.

Another meeting of the Transportation Committee will be held in the middle of October to make sure everything is running smoothly with the new changes.