SPECIAL REPORT
“A school bus carrying preschool children, some of
whom are barely more than toddlers, is very different from a standard school bus route,” she said. “Bus mon- itors do far more than manage behavior. They make sure young children are properly buckled into safety harnesses, remain seated and are safely handed off to an authorized parent or guardian.” Expecting a bus driver to navigate traffic while super- vising a bus full of preschoolers puts unnecessary stress on the driver and creates avoidable safety risks, she added. “At Gateway, we believe every child deserves a safe ride
and every parent deserves peace of mind,” said Eggen- burg. “Rather than removing basic safety protections, federal policy should maintain clear baseline standards for young children while giving local programs the resources and flexibility to meet them. Having a second trained adult on the bus isn’t extra paperwork. It’s basic child safety.” Jennie Mauer, Wisconsin Head Start Association exec-
utive director, noted the state is an urban/rural mix with Head Start programs serving about 12,000 children and their families. “We’re in the majority of counties and oftentimes in
very rural locations,” she said. “There are Head Start build- ings that have one or two classrooms. In many counties, it’s one of the only handful of licensed childcare pro- grams. It’s a critical link in our early care and education infrastructures, especially for working families. “Similar to other states, the majority of Head Start
families are working families, and Head Start is a part of helping families to get to work,” Mauer continued. “About 30 percent of Head Start programs provide transportation to their families and transportation costs are one of the areas that have seen some of the biggest cost increases and challenges around getting bus drivers especially in rural Wisconsin where you have a declin- ing population and a lot of competition for staff. It’s an increasingly difficult service to provide.” Head Start exists to support families in difficult con-
ditions, Mauer noted, adding cost pressures have made things “incredibly difficult and have put programs in challenging situations where they are having to make really hard decisions about how to make their budget work and what to cut.” It’s easy to get lost in the NPRM’s 75 pages, she said. “Our position is that we don’t think that this rule
should go forward. This wasn’t a regulatory process that said what are the onerous regulations? How do we make this work? We’re more in a space of rhetoric and less the space of what do programs actually need.
“This is why I believe it shouldn’t go forward,” Mauer
said. “It opens it up for tremendous discretion on behalf of the federal government to recapture funds should programs not opt to offer fewer hours of service as a prime example or to offer to have more children in the classroom because their analysis about how this saves all this money and can serve more kids is because it’s relying on programs cutting services.” Mauer said when she speaks with Wisconsin Head
Start programs about the proposed changes, she noted that staff are wrestling with what they know is good for children and the myriad of cost pressures they face. “What I hear from programs is having a monitor is real-
ly best practice and has tremendous benefits as it relates to safety,” she said. “I have heard a variety of anecdotes from programs discussing that if the bus is dropping off outside of an apartment building, which is quite com- mon, walking a three- or four-year-old to the door if Mom and Dad for whatever reason are not able to meet the bus at the drop-off point and how critical it is to have an aide to do that because these are really small kids. If it was just one bus driver, how challenging that would be?” Mauer relayed an experience of a program director
with a school bus fire. She discussed just how critical it was to have an adult monitor on the bus to assist the driver in unbuckling the children from safety restraints and evacuating them. “What I’m hearing from programs is that they firmly
believe the best practice is to have a driver and a monitor, and it’s also a very challenging service in this fiscal and staffing environment to happen,” Mauer said. “The answer to our problems isn’t to say we get rid of regulations. It’s that we need adequate funding to provide what we know is a best practice to keep children safe and healthy.” Mauer emphasized Head Start programs are being
put in a “terrible position.” Still, she added, Head Start employees continue to stick to their mission against the backdrop of resources being squeezed over many years and having to work through other challenges such as after the onset of the COVID pandemic. Not all families have access to vehicles to get their kids
to programs or to schools, Mauer noted. “I really worry that in general what we see in this NPRM is a push away from the things we know are best practices for kids and families, and diluting the quality overall,” she said. “I worry that this is going to really neg- atively impact the program overall, but especially those families who have the hardest time getting to and from their center.” ●
The Head Start Performance Standards are at
https://headstart.gov/policy/45-cfr-chap-xiii. Transportation is Part 1303.70-75.
22 School Transportation News • NOVEMBER 2026
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