INDUSTRY CONNECTIONS SMART COLLABORATION
TEAMING WITH CITY, REGIONAL TRANSIT AUTHORITY BENEFITS SCHOOL DISTRICTS AND TAXPAYERS, IOWA TRANSPORTATION PROFESSIONALS AGREE WRITTEN BY ERIC WOOLSON
same school will be 60 minutes long, carry 18 students and stretch up to 32 miles as in- dividual students are picked up and dropped off at homes. (State code permits maximum ride times of 75 minutes for high school students and 60 minutes for elementary and middle school children.) Liston’s office supplies Tishim’s team
£ DART Transportation Manager Randy McKern at one of the terminals that buses students from Des Moines Public Schools.
with information on the number of students in each area of the city and their school of attendance. DMPS and DART route planners work together to build and tweak routes to meet student needs. “DART operates about 40 school routes daily for our students, and we operate about 100 yellow bus routes daily,” Liston said. Te DART arrangement provides stu-
dents, parents and the district with greater flexibility in pick-up and drop-off times and range than a standard yellow bus route. Te agreement also allows middle and
D
es Moines (Iowa) Public Schools Transportation Manager Todd Liston knows long-running partnerships with
the city and regional transit authority are winners for his district. “Collaboration between entities, where it makes sense, is a good thing — we’re happy to do it to provide student transportation. We also work with other agencies to help us all reduce expenses,” Liston said. “It’s a win-win.”
Te staff at Des Moines Area Regional
Transit Authority, which serves Iowa’s capi- tal and 18 surrounding cities, couldn’t agree more about the upside to DART’s partner- ship agreeement with the school district. “How many times do you hear people say
they want government to collaborate in a smart way?” said DART Public Affairs Manager Gunnar Olson. “Tat’s what we’re doing.” Transporting regular education students
via DART buses to middle and high schools has “allowed the DMPS yellow bus fleet to ensure the specific needs of its younger, special education and disabled students are met,” Liston said. Te current agreement started in 1994,
16 School Transportation News April 2014
explained one of its authors, DART Plan- ning Director Jim Tishim. It eventually expanded district wide after starting as a demonstration project involving two schools to utilize the authority’s reverse-commute capacity out of downtown during the morn- ing rush hour. From the start, the district saved substan-
tial money through the reduced purchase of new buses. “Tere may have been some attrition over time (among DMPS drivers) but I don’t recall any layoffs. What it did was free up their staff to do things they’d wanted to do before,” Tishim explained.
“We didn’t hire any new drivers for the morning routes; we were able to better utilize our existing staff and smartly use the vehicles we had.”
THE SETUP
DMPS pays DART about $685,000 under the 2013-14 contract, and the transit authority provides roughly 90,000 rides to students each month of school. Te average DART run lasts 25 minutes, is eight miles long and serves 60 students at a handful of bus stops. Fairly large groups of students get on or off at each stop, said Liston, while the yellow bus route to the
high school students to ride regular DART routes at no charge throughout the metro during evenings, weekends, holidays and summer breaks. It also covers high school students who take advanced classes at local community college campuses and the 5,000-plus district employees. “DART gets riders and revenue, and DMPS has more capacity to meet needs that are more specialized,” Liston said. Even now, the agreement continues to
evolve. “We’ve given back a couple small routes that were outside our area (as DART routes and school boundaries have changed) and they’ve given us more somewhere else,” said Randy McKern, DART’s transporta- tion manager, who started his career as a school bus driver in West Des Moines and worked as a branch manager for Laid- law Transit Services with the Urbandale and Waukee school districts. He oversees day-to-day routes for students and regular DART riders. McKern suggests districts considering
such agreements begin with small-scale demonstration projects. He also noted the Des Moines agreement is sharply different than a typical outsourcing situation. “We’re not taking over the whole thing. We’re taking on pieces and helping them out,” he added.
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