STN ONLINE Behind the Scenes


Tis year’s America’s Best School Bus Techni- cian and School Bus Inspector Training and Skills Competition took place Sept. 24-27 south of Seattle at Federal Way Public Schools. Te event was good exposure for the school district, which showed off a portion of its $44 million state-of- the-art facility. You can read about this year’s technician and inspector winners in this issue’s News Briefs section, as well learn more about Federal Way’s transportation facility. You can also read about the America’s Best event on our website by visiting www.stnonline.com/go/38 and about Federal Way at www.stnonline.com/go/39. In these articles you will be able to access a photo gallery showing some behind-the-scenes action related to America’s Best and Federal Way’s transportation department. Earlier in September, members of the American School Bus Council visited Tucson Unified


School District in Arizona to promote the yellow bus alongside Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx, this month's coverboy. Te federal officials stopped in Tucson as part of the U.S. Department of Education’s “Strong Start, Bright Future” back-to-school bus tour. While you can read all about the Sept. 11 Tucson visit in this month’s issue, head over to our Facebook page to check out a photo gallery of additional images from the event.


WORKSHOP SNEAK PEEK ON TSD CONFERENCE WEBSITE If special needs transportation is your specialty, be sure


to visit www.tsdconference.com for a sampling of some of the scheduled workshops to be held from Feb. 28 through March 5 in Nashville. Some of the workshop titles include interventions when transporting older students with autism and bi-polar disorder, documentation to support safe inte- gration of students with special needs onto traditional bus routes, and customizing evacuation plans for students with special considerations. Te TSD website also has all the information you’ll need to register for the conference, make hotel reservations. And see what the Gaylord Opryland Resort and Convention Center has to offer attendees.


WEB EXCLUSIVE: HOW THE SEQUESTER IS AFFECTING MILITARY BASE SCHOOLS AND THEIR STUDENT TRANSPORTATION SERVICES


While the federal sequestration signed into law this spring affected many school districts’ budgets, military schools are experiencing even deeper cuts because of the loss of Impact Aid funding. Some districts absorbed the $67 million sequester of Impact Aid by building it into their budgets months before the reductions were triggered on March 1, according


to the National Association of Federally Impacted Schools. NAFIS surveyed select school districts and found that some are cutting transportation routes due to the 5-percent across-the-board cut. A superintendent at one such district,


Dr. Burnie L. Roper of Lackland ISD that operates for Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, recently told Texas Public


12 School Transportation News November 2013


Radio that he lost nearly a third of his operating budget. At Fort Bragg, the country’s most pop- ulous Army base, educators have seen their budgets cut by half or more, in some cases, according to news reports. What are the impacts on school


transportation budgets? Read all about it at www.stnonline.com/home/web-exclusive.


£ Left: Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx and Education Secretary Arne Duncan walk the Tucson Unfied school bus yard with Director of Transportation Paul Larson. Above: a 2013 America's Best contestant.


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