rather than forcing the employees to share one toilet. Unlike Grossmont in California, all White County’s buses continue to be powered by diesel. Georgia only has several electric buses in the state, all of them operating in the Atlanta metro area. But Hipps said she is considering electric as well as new propane autogas school buses, especially as propane already heats the transportation building. “I don’t know if we’re there yet, but I definitely have requested quotes for both,” she added.
Last month, Salem-Keizer School District in Ore-
gon completed the move into a new $34 million facility that is a far cry from the trailers that Director of Trans- portation T.J. Crockett and his staff used for the past year. Service work began last month at the 33,000 square-foot Gaffin facility that operates and maintains 300 school bus operation, 224 of them on routes. Nearly half of the fleet continues to run out of the original Hawthorne facility east of downtown, but it is inadequate for much of the service work that is necessary. “You have plenty of room to bring the whole bus in and
walk around it,” Crockett said of the new 20-foot-by-60- foot bays. “At our old site, if you pull in a big bus, you can’t shut the door to work on the engine. It’s barely 40 feet.”
White County School District in Georgia used nearly $5 million from a new local sales tax to upgrade a facility that dated back to a literal 1970s barn.
In addition to the shop bays, Gaffin includes new office space. Crockett explained that he did not have enough employees to adequately run all operations. “We needed folks in each place to hand out keys, manage the trips, the daily coverage, assignments, etc.,” he continued. “We expanded our routing team, our training team and our clerical team because the number of hours to cover trans- portation exceeds eight. You need those two shifts.”
Continued on pg. 28 ➥
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