Poudre School District adjusts 2024-25 school start times to address bus driver shortage

Six of the eight middle schools in Poudre School District will move to 7:30 a.m. start times next fall, and eight elementary schools will have starting times moved 20-30 minutes under a one-year plan to address a critical shortage of bus drivers.

Acknowledging that “doing nothing is not an option,” as board member Kevin Havelda said, the Poudre School District Board of Education approved a bell-time and transportation optimization plan that will require 12 fewer bus drivers for the 2024-25 school year than the 122 currently needed each day to cover all existing routes. The plan passed by a 5-2 vote.

The option the board approved was the one favored by the majority of the 5,556 respondents last month to a community survey, 56% to 44%. Starting times in the two options given varied by just five minutes per school, with the selected plan using the earlier start times.

The length of the school day at each school will remain unchanged.

About 9,000 of the nearly 26,000 students attending PSD’s non-charter schools rely on district buses to get to and from school each day, Superintendent Brian Kingsley and other district officials said. PSD’s charter schools are responsible for providing transportation to their students without using district buses or drivers.

The neighboring Thompson School District has gone to “rolling blackouts” to deal with its driver shortage, only serving each of its routes seven of every eight school days and leaving families having to figure out how to get their kids to school on their own on the off days, said Jeff Connell, PSD’s chief operations officer.

That’s not an option PSD leadership or members of its Board of Education were willing to consider, they said. They weren’t willing to eliminate routes, either, over concerns about students who don’t have any other way to get to school.

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Changing the starting and dismissal times at some schools allows more drivers to double up on morning and/or afternoon runs, reducing the number of drivers needed at any one time. Last month, PSD had 37 vacant positions for bus drivers that it has not been able to fill, Connell said. And it takes two months for a new driver to receive training, commercial driver’s license and other endorsements required to drive a school bus in Colorado.

The approved plan also gives more drivers the opportunity to work eight-hour days, a change Connell believes will attract new drivers; help reduce the annual 30% turnover rate; and give the district better coverage for field trips, athletics and other school activities that are currently being provided by charter bus companies.

Each school bus route costs PSD about $80,000 a year in driver’s pay and benefits, fuel and maintenance, Connell said. And the district is spending more than $400,000 a year for charter buses that would not be needed under the approved plan, one of two created by an outside consultant with input from staff in PSD’s transportation department.

“We can do nothing, but that does not come without consequences, as well,” said Kristen Draper, the board’s president. “So, we need to be thinking about what those consequences may look like not only for the transportation system and our budgets, but what does it look like for those kids? And what it looks like for those kids is they don’t end up going to school, and that is a problem. That is something that we, as a school board, should be extremely concerned about.”

How will start times change?

Fifteen of the district’s 31 non-charter elementary schools will see no change at all in their start and dismissal times under the new plan, while four others will vary by just 5 or 10 minutes.

Six middle schools will move their starting times from 7:50 a.m. to 7:30 a.m., while a seventh will go from 7:50 a.m. to 7:40 a.m. The changes come years after PSD shifted middle and high school start times later to bring the district in closer alignment with national recommendations related to adolescent sleep and school start times. Those changes took effect for the 2019-20 school year. Ideally, Connell and several board members said, middle school starting times will be pushed back again in 2025-26 to regain that alignment.

Five of the district’s six comprehensive high schools, including the combined middle-high schools in Timnath and Wellington, will have their starting times pushed by 5 minutes, from 9 a.m. to 9:05 a.m., while Poudre High’s 9:05 a.m. starting time would remain unchanged.

Thirty-five of the district’s 49 non-charter schools will have starting and dismissal times within 15 minutes of what they are this year, according to school-by-school schedules published with the survey available Feb. 7-21 and shared with the Board of Education in meetings Feb. 6 and again Tuesday night.

More: With PSD changing start times for 2024-25, here's when schools will start and end each day

No changes are planned in the starting times of Traut Elementary and Kinard Middle schools, both school-of-choice-only schools that only provide busing for students with special needs or identified as homeless, as required under federal law, a district spokesperson said in a recent email to the Coloradoan.

Starting times will be moved up 15 minutes at Centennial High School, an alternative high school, while remaining the same at the other district's other alternative high school, Poudre Community Academy. There will also be no changes at Poudre Global Academy, a hybrid in-person and online school for students in kindergarten through 12th grade.

The biggest change will be at Putnam Elementary, where the school day will start and end 30 minutes earlier than this year, running from 8:25 a.m. to 3:08 p.m. Starting times at Johnson, Kruse, Lopez, Riffenburgh and Tavelli elementaries will be 25 minutes earlier next school year than they are this year. The starting time at Bethke Elementary will be 25 minutes later next year than this year.

How do these changes reduce the number of PSD bus drivers needed?

The optimization plan, designed by First Consulting, a division of First Transportation, with input from PSD’s transportation staff, will reduce the peak need for bus drivers from 122 to 110 by allowing more to cover multiple runs each morning and afternoon.

Although PSD has been able to cover every route every day this school year, the day will soon come when it cannot, Connell said. The district is regularly using mechanics, supervisors and managers with the required commercial driver’s license and endorsements as substitute drivers. There have been half a dozen days this school year, he said, when everybody that can legally drive a bus for the district, including Transportation Director Desiree Fisher, have all been on the road at once.

That’s not a sustainable option, he said.

“That means that was the absolute last person available to get on a bus and run a bus route,” Connell said.

More: 'It's going to hurt kids': Teachers comment on proposed PSD graduation requirement changes

Who voted against the plan, and why?

The two board members who voted against the plan, Connor Duffy and Scott Schoenbauer, had pushed for standardizing start times across the district for each level immediately to avoid having to adjust starting times and bus schedules again in 2025-26 to accommodate expected school closings, consolidations and boundary changes to deal with projected declining enrollment and the corelating budget reductions.

PSD schools have 14 different starting times and 19 different dismissal times.

Although school board members seemed to favor standardizing start times so that all schools at each level would have the same starting and ending times when that work is completed, the majority were not willing to delay decisions on when schools would start and end next fall any longer. The board rejected a separate motion to give district staff time to come up with a plan to standardize start times beginning next fall, also by a 5-2 vote.

“Here’s the conundrum that we go into if we were to postpone this,” Draper said. “OK, if we say we’re going to talk about one big change after consolidation, so that means doing nothing at the moment, that means we lose the $1 million to $1.5 million savings. It means we run the risk of rolling blackouts. It means that there is a very good chance that we’re having this conversation, but we’re having it as an immediate need because tomorrow we’re going to have the same problem we had today, which is we are five routes short. How do we make that happen? What do we do about that?

“And we’re doing it on the backs of kids, because those kids are not getting to school.”

Reporter Kelly Lyell covers education, breaking news, some sports and other topics of interest for the Coloradoan. Contact him at kellylyell@coloradoan.com, x.com/KellyLyell and  facebook.com/KellyLyell.news. 

This article originally appeared on Fort Collins Coloradoan: PSD adjusts 2024-25 start times to address bus-driver shortage