The detailed process of getting a school bus to your door
Hours of planning, revisions and test runs needed before classes start Tuesday
It’s a big job, driving 32,000 children to school.
When summer break ends and classes resume Tuesday, school buses will roll all across Niagara. By the end of the day, drivers will have spent about 1,600 hours behind the wheel and covered 61,000 kilometres.
They fill 542 routes connected to 153 schools. And the yellow buses — never a smooth ride, even on a smooth road — will head down highways and up patchy country lanes on schedules timed to the minute. Next day, they’ll do it again. “It’s a lot of work,” says Lori Ziraldo, executive director at Niagara Student Transportation Services.
“Bus drivers do an incredible job serving our students and our families.”
What the public doesn’t see, though, is the work required to get to this point.
Over the summer it took hours of planning, test runs, route adjustments and last-minute accommodation for new students before the army of buses can fan out in the dark early Tuesday.
It starts with routes drawn up by staff at NSTS, which is a consortium between Niagara Catholic District School Board and District School Board of Niagara.
Ziraldo credits skilled employees and vital computer programs for drawing all the data together into efficient, logical and — most important — safe routes that can be done in reasonable time.
Remarkably, it used to be done manually, on maps.
“We send out draft routes to bus companies in the middle of July,” says Ziraldo.
“They have drivers trial-run them, and then the bus company dispatcher comes to the NSTS by
mid-August with any feedback they have on the routes.”
They start from the previous year’s maps but, she says, “students are dynamic.”
“They move in, they start kindergarten, they graduate.
“So while we roll (the routes) forward, we make changes based on the actual students.”
It sounds complicated, but it gets worse — some locations can’t be used to pick up and drop off kids because of heavy traffic. Intersections with traffic lights are out, too.
And construction projects pop up all year to complicate the bestlaid plans.
Parents can register online to receive email notification if their child’s bus is being delayed more than 10 minutes, at nsts.ca.
Bus routes get finalized in time for the start of the school year, but even then they aren’t set in stone.
“Now every day (via automatic file transfer) we download students’ records from the two school boards so we know what grade the student goes to, what school they go to, what their home address is,” says Ziraldo.
“We also know if they have daycare with a pickup and dropoff address different than their home address” and whether students have moved or new ones have registered.
She says: “There is an attention to safety first and foremost. And we look at things like ride times as being very important.
“The school boards’ policy says we can’t exceed 60-minute ride times (per student), and we have some routes that are real rural areas.”
In many cases, a driver works a split shift, first picking up and delivering high school students before switching to elementaryage kids for the morning drive. The afternoon run starts a few hours later.
It always takes a few days to work out the kinks at the start of a new school year.
“On the first day of school, we have a lot of kindergarten students’ families waiting with them at the bus stop taking pictures” so delays are inevitable, Ziraldo says.
“And on the way home, we have drivers taking their time releasing every student to the bus stop until that route is established and they get to know the kindergarten students and their parents.”