By Aila Boyd
aboyd@mainstreetnewspapers.com
Ben Irving, director of operations for Botetourt County Public Schools (BCPS), presented the results of a bus routing and scheduling evaluation that the district commissioned Tyler Technologies to conduct at the School Board’s January meeting.
“Every aspect of the district’s transportation plan is commendable,” the report found.
Ben Irvin, director of operations for BCPS, said that he was “very pleased” by the findings of the report. “This was a great review of every single mile that we travel,” he said. He explained that Chris Morris, operations manager, and Brandy Campbell, transportation assistant/route coordinator, are instrumental to the bus routing process. He added that the division’s “amazing bus drivers” should also be recognized for their contributions.
According to the report, the division transports 3,820 students on 53 buses. Servicing a rural county, it said, presents challenges that more urbanized districts don’t have, especially considering that the road network in the county has many dead-end roads and few options in many areas for safe and legal bus turnarounds.
Despite the challenges, the report found that “obvious care has been taken to create runs that rarely overlap.”
When two runs need to share the same stretch of road, one of the runs is marked as being “unserviceable” for that portion of the road, which indicates that the remaining run and only that run is in pickup or drop-off mode for students located along it. The designation as being “unserviceable” prevents a student from being assigned to the wrong run, the report said.
“I was thrilled when I read this,” Michelle Crook, chair of the School Board, said of the report.
Dr. Lisa Chen, superintendent, said that the division occasionally gets questions from the public about why they see buses only transporting a handful of students at a time, which she said is because they’re in-between multiple runs.
Tyler Technologies, an independent company, was selected to perform the evaluation through a bid process.
