To: MSAD 15 Staff, Families, and Community

From: Dr. Chanda P. Turner, Interim Superintendent

Date: February 10, 2025

Re: Transportation Challenges this week

 

Alas, the illnesses that have been impacting so many people in our community and across the area lately have not skipped over the MSAD 15 Transportation Department. We are anticipating some significant challenges in transporting students for the rest of this week. These challenges necessitated the cancellation of the Bus 28 run today. We are working on additional back-up coverage for various routes to anticipate ongoing and new transportation department absences this week. We would like to make you all aware of the options we may be using this week, which could include:

  • Reorganizing bus runs – this would mean dividing up an existing bus run to be covered by other buses. This might mean your student(s) would be picked up by a different bus than usual. This could also mean bus pickup and drop off times for the impacted routes would run later than usual.

  • Bus substitutes – we are leveraging every sub we can find including the Supervisor of Transportation, who has been driving a bus almost every day. Bus subs may require a little more time than usual to navigate their runs and ensure all students are picked up and dropped off safely. This could mean bus pickup and drop off times for the impacted routes would run later than usual.

  • Van runs – we may divide up a bus run and send vans to do groups of pickups and drop offs for that route. This might mean your student who normally rides the bus would ride in a van and that pick up and drop off times may shift slightly.

  • Run cancellation – this is our least preferred option, but we may have to cancel some bus routes if we aren’t able to staff runs appropriately. We would deeply appreciate families who can help get students to and from school if this were to happen. If students are not able to get to school, any absences and missed work would be considered excused for that day.

  • Remote learning day – if we get to a situation where we are not able to transport a significant amount of students, we would call a remote learning day. This could be for only certain grade levels (for example – we might have middle school and high school remote with elementary students in person) or call a remote learning day for the entire district, depending on the situation.

 

As you can imagine, none of these solutions are ideal. We will do our best to communicate with impacted families as quickly as possible. However, given the volume of challenges and limited staff to manage it all, there may be times we are not able to keep you 100% up to date. We will communicate any remote learning day calls as soon and as early as possible. We will prioritize communication with families whose bus runs are impacted by reorganization, van runs, and cancellations first. We will do our best to additionally communicate with families if and when bus routes are running late, though that is frequently more difficult as it is a constantly changing situation. We appreciate your grace and your patience as we navigate this challenge.

 

Please join me in wishing wellness to all our staff, students, and families. We are hopeful that these illnesses will be over quickly for all who are experiencing them.