FIRST TAKE
THIS MONTH’S EDITION TARGETS ISSUES AND IDEAS OF IMPORTANCE TO SCHOOL ADMINISTRATORS. WHY SHOULD YOU AS A TRANSPORTATION PROFESSIONAL CARE? YOUR CAREER AS WELL AS THE INDUSTRY’S FUTURE DEPENDS ON IT. A common moral of the story that has developed over the past couple of years is
Getting Principals and Superintendents
in Transportation’s Corner
By Ryan Gray
that school districts with successful transportation departments tend to have powerful allies in the superintendent’s office. Superintendents either value the related service, or they don’t. But transportation officials hold the key to how they’re perceived, which in turn can dictate how well the service is supported. It just so happens that often trans- portation departments aren’t sharing the right information or doing everything in their power to foster a strong relationship with school system leadership. It’s not just a matter of having your superintendent like you — although that defi-
nitely helps. Te real opinion shapers in the community can be the principals at the individual school sites. In this economic environment, it has become critical to convince principals of the importance of school transportation and how it relates to ensuring students make it to class. Otherwise, even the superintendent might not be able to save you, especially when the argument comes down to school buses or teachers. If you let the conversation get that far, you know full well who’s most likely to win. Te rub is that superintendents and school administrators who control the purse
strings and “get it” when “it” comes to the importance of transportation services almost always have a history of working with a strong transportation department. On page 32 in this month’s issue, I talk to Dr. Elizabeth Molina Morgan, the 2010
National Superintendent of the Year, about her close relationship with transportation at Washington County Public Schools in Hagerstown, Md. What is Dr. Morgan’s back- ground, you ask? She is a former school principal, and as an assistant superintendent of schools at Montgomery County, she worked with a well-respected transportation department headed at the time by retired Transportation Director John Matthews. Morgan said it herself that transportation is the most important service in ensuring that kids can make it to and from school, especially in today’s day and age of No Child Left Behind when already hard to come by funding is intrinsically linked to butts in the seats and test scores. Washington County is a large school district in land size, some 400 square miles, but
it is also quite rural. Aside from the city center of Hagerstown, much of its service area is mountainous or spread out, often times with student homes located three miles from each other. It’s quite common-place for school buses in these areas to be on the road for 60 minutes or more from the start of the route to the finish. Yet, this relationship between school transportation and superintendent is not only
the key to successful operations in smaller or medium-sized districts. Last April, we pro- filed the relationship between the transportation operations in Clark County, Nev., the fifth-largest district in the nation, and Chief Financial Officer Jeff Weiler, who reports directly to Superintendant Walt Ruffles. Ruffles just so happened to be a finalist in this year’s Superintendant of the Year competition won by Morgan. See a trend? Large or small, rural or urban, school transportation leaders must remain in tune to
the needs of school administrators. As we also discuss in this month’s issue, this entails ensuring lines of communication remain open and utilized, especially in the sharing of valuable data such as ridership and, of course, budgets. It just so happens that most schools nationwide are also currently preparing their budgets for the 2011 fiscal year. Now’s definitely the time to re-evaluate your professional relationship with your
superintendent as well as your local principals, and it’s vital to communicate these re- lationships throughout the transportation department. It’s time to understand why things are how they are, and what transportation can do about it. ■
12 School Transportation News Magazine April 2010
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56