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School bus schedulers rise to COVID challenge

Transportation Supervisor Lenny Barker (left) and Transportation Assistant Fred Finn stand before a school bus at the Saranac Lake Central School District bus garage. (Enterprise photo — Amy Scattergood)

SARANAC LAKE — Five miles outside of downtown Saranac Lake toward Bloomingdale, across from a hayfield, a parking lot full of yellow school buses sits behind the Saranac Lake Central School District Bus Garage. Inside the building, Transportation Assistant Fred Finn’s desk is outfitted like an air traffic controller’s, with computer screens running software and maps, clipboards of routes, and Post-its with notes and phone numbers taped to a bulletin board along with the obligatory face masks.

“Always the first week of school is a major challenge,” said Transportation Supervisor Lenny Barker, whose own desk is next door. “This is not normal by any means.”

When school started on Tuesday, it was the first day back for students not only for the fall 2020 semester but also since schools shut down in mid-March due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Since then, Barker and Finn and their team, along with pretty much everyone else in the school district, have been working to figure out how to get the more than 1,000 students in the district back into the classroom.

Getting them there starts, often quite literally, with getting them on the bus.

“This year we started on Tuesday. Then we had remote learning on Wednesday. And today we started all over again,” said Barker, whose job is to help coordinate transportation for those 1,000 students.

Transportation Assistant Fred Finn runs the school’s transportation system from his desk at the bus garage. (Enterprise photo — Amy Scattergood)

This fall, the students have been divided up into sections that are staggered by times and days. Grades K through 3, grades 4 through 6 and grades 7 through 12 all have a separate start and stop times. Grades K through 6 have in-person instruction four days a week, while grades 7-12 meet at the high school two days a week. On Wednesdays, all students study remotely while the classrooms and buildings are cleaned.

Imagine the logistics of how all that operates for the students, their families and for the teachers and staff. Now imagine how that works if it’s your job to ferry all those kids to all those places at all those times.

“We have six routes a day, three in the morning and three in the afternoon,” said Barker, for 25 buses, 14 bus drivers and seven vans. “So it’s quite a challenge to make everything fit together. We do have the largest school district in New York state, miles-wise.”

On Wednesdays, the school building may be closed, but the bus garage is not. That’s the day when the staff delivers food and homework to students at home, and transports BOCES and St. Bernard’s Catholic school students, as well as special education students. Those students’ schedules also have to be jigsawed into the district school schedule for the other four days. And when school events, field trips and sports restart, they’ll have to be worked into the same system.

It helps, says Barker, that his staff has been working all summer; in fact, they never stopped, but kept delivering food and homework after the schools shut down in March. And all those Chromebooks that students got before school started? Barker and Finn’s team delivered those, too.

Papers with route information are printed out every day at the bus garage. (Enterprise photo — Amy Scattergood)

Another thing that helps is that both men are deeply familiar with the school, the kids and the area, and have both been in their current jobs for seven years, and drove buses themselves before that.

“Fred knows all the routes. He knows every student in this school district and where they live,” said Barker.

Sorting out school transportation in the age of COVID isn’t just about routes and timing. Students have to wear masks and stay socially distant, which means that each bus should have a monitor as well as a driver.

“Our goal is to have a monitor in every bus, especially for the younger children,” said Barker, who says that they’ve almost achieved that, though they still have a few to go.

Buses can hold no more than 20 students at a time — one student per seat — and each bus gets sanitized after each individual run.

“You don’t know what works until you start trying it,” said Finn. “We have to look at the big picture.”

For Finn, the big picture is on his computer monitors, where he has a program that runs and updates the bus routes and tailors them to each student’s home address.

“Each of the orange dots is a kid,” said Finn.

“We tried to plan everything out, but there are so many moving parts,” said Barker, who says that each bus will run about 25 to 50 miles per day more with the new schedule than last year. Last year each bus ran about 100 miles per day — that’s 36,500 miles a year per bus — so do the math.

“The hardest thing is the last-minute changes; everybody’s under difficult circumstances,” said Barker, who gave as an example one bus that on Tuesday ended up with too many kids. They had to move the routes around, contact the parents, the kids, the school — all of which took time. Finn noted that he was trying to reroute a bus to accommodate one student whose mother had recently changed jobs — to a location that did not have a bus route.

“The only real problem has been that we’ve had such a short time to get it done,” said Finn of the new transportation system. “It’s really only been a few weeks.”

The school was only able to get the numbers of how many students were coming back to in-person classes recently, after Gov. Andrew Cuomo okayed that schools could reopen. The school district then sent out a survey to families, who could decide to home-school, have remote instruction or in-person schooling. Then Barker and his crew had to determine which students would be riding buses and which students would be driven by parents or, in some cases, would drive themselves.

“We don’t want a bus to be sitting outside of somebody’s house that’s going remote, tooting the horn and waiting for them to come out,” said Finn.

As the two men stood near the fleet of parked buses, they pointed to the windows and the roof air vents that would remain open, even as temperatures drop in the coming Adirondack fall. “Less lost and found,” said Finn of all the winter gear that will likely remain on the students rather than left on the buses.

“We’ve changed the way that we transport children; let’s put it that way,” said Barker.

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