(Photo by Phil Roeder)
Angie Minew
Saugerties parents should be receiving their childrenâs school-bus-stop information at the end of this month. A few people may not be happy. One of them is former member of the school board Angie Minew, who claims an issue about an unsatisfactory bus stop has not been addressed by school officials.
Minew recently moved to a new house. Thereâs an elementary-school bus pickup in a church parking lot along State Route 9W in West Camp, which she says her new neighbors have informed her has only been in use for the past two years. Efforts to leave the stop along Patterson Road, where it was previously located, reportedly went unheeded. Minew said that a bus headed to and from the junior-senior high school still stops at the Patterson Road location.
âWhat happened was the bus driver didnât like doing the route this way, and that was the end of it for the elementary kids,â Minew reported. âWhat happens now is a large bus comes, and it drops off and picks up a high-school boy exactly where weâre asking for our stop to return to. And it then it turns around and goes to the school like itâs supposed to.â
For elementary-school students, Minew explained, walking to the bus stop involves crossing three streets, including Route 9W, that they wouldnât have to cross if they were picked up at Patterson Road.
âThe district claims that they did a bus survey five years ago and deemed that the stop was not safe, and that the stop was not existing at all,â Minew said. âThatâs not true on both counts. I was on the board five years ago, and I was the chair of the transportation committee. Their response is that itâs not their responsibility how the children get to the bus stop. So I said, âThen what does it matter if you cross the street to get on the bus stop thatâs existing?â How is it safe to walk up 9W with no shoulder? Honestly and truly, it could pick kids up on the other side. Weâre just asking to use the same bus stop as the high school. Weâre not asking for anything special. This affects about 15 neighborhood kids in the area and about ten kids that I provide [daycare] services for. The parents have been shut down for the past five years.â
Saugerties schools superintendent Seth Turner said he wasnât able to address specific parent concerns. He did speak about how bus routes are created. Theyâre not often changed. Much of the planning for a given school year happens during the spring and summer.
âAs the end of a school year comes around we have new registrants for kindergarten or we have people coming into the district,â Turner explained. âWe have addresses and daycare request forms, and they need to be turned in by April 1, and private-school placement requests as well. We then begin to plan roughly what the bus routes will be. Students going from sixth grade into seventh grade, adjustments get made. It happens organically. That all comes into the puzzle, and over the course of the summer bus routes are worked on and finalized.â
Turner said that the district uses Versatrans, a school-bus routing program designed by Tyler Technologies, a Texas-based software company.
âThe computer will generate a pretty good idea of what will work, but it takes individual oversight to double-check and make sure,â Turner said. âWe transport — Iâm shooting from the hip right now — close to 2000 students. It works pretty well, but if there are concerns bus drivers practice those routes during August, and if they identify an issue we can make changes. But typically there arenât any drastic changes year-to-year.â
The district traditionally errs on the side of student safety, Turner said. In 1996 the voters decided that elementary-school students in the district living over a half-mile from their school be offered bus transportation, and any junior- and senior-high students living over a mile and a half from the school be offered the same.
Minew said sheâd raised the issue with the districtâs business manager, Lissa Jilek, but hadnât received an acceptable response.
âItâs usually a bus-driver issue, but in this case Mrs. Jilek has the final say, and I think sheâs a business manager and shouldnât be in charge of transportation and maintenance and custodians and finance and everything under the sun,â Minew said. âIâve been in communication with her since February, and Iâve been getting nowhere. Weâre not asking for anything crazy. Weâre not asking for a new stop to be created. Weâre asking to use the same exact stop that they use for a large bus for the high school. I donât see what the problem is.â
Turner said the district takes all school-bus issues seriously, but isnât able to make everyone happy. âWe are very much driven by policy and law, but there is flexibility to allow for the safety of everyone involved,â said Turner. Issues should first be addressed with building administrators.
âWe follow the chain of command. You always want to bring your concern to a building principal in this case. They may not be able to address something transportation-related, and that would get kicked up to the business office. And thereâs only been a handful of situations where weâve had to go and review. If thereâs a concern, we send out our people to take a look at it, whether the issue comes from a bus driver or parent. If potentially itâs not safe to stop a bus due to visibility or speed, we will review them.â