Annamarie Banner, the director of transportation for Garland Independent School District in Texas, said she was only short 10 drivers at the start of year. That was until 20 drivers didn’t show up to the first in-service training and the team had to frantically plan what the first day of school with 30 drivers short would look like. Garland ISD started on Aug. 8, and has around 300 routes transporting about 18,000 students across 93-square miles. She noted that the surprise of being short an addition-
al 20 drivers created a challenge at the start of school. She explained that even if she hired people immediately, it would still take six weeks to train them before they could get their CDL and a school bus route. “We have a lot of students who would not be able to make it to school without a bus ride, Transfinder helps us combine routes that are in the same area,” she explained. “Doing this may cause us to run later than usual, but getting ev- eryone to school is important even if it is running late.” She explained that the district runs three tiers of
routes, and they also implemented a new routing soft- ware, Transfinder. Her staff used the software to access the routes to see if drivers had enough bandwidth to
either run two routes or pick up more kids. Regardless of the shortage, Banner said this was her most successful school opening in her 26-year career. “I think that a lot of that had to do with communica-
tion in advance,” she shared, adding that making sure the drivers, community and schools knew what was going to happen before school started helped immense- ly. “Our department was talking to other campuses about next year before school was even out,” she said. “Questions like: Where are the unloading zones for your campus? Where are the loading zones? Who is your main point of contact? How late will someone be at the campus?” Banner aded that next year she plans to reach out to the campuses individually and visit each one to deter- mine what transportation can do better. ●
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