Some Saugerties High School (SHS) parents have taken to social media to decry what they call overcrowding on a morning BOCES bus where students have reported sitting on one another’s laps and on the floor, but district officials said the bus is actually below legal capacity.
In an interview last week with Hudson Valley One, superintendent Dan Erceg explained that buses are allowed to operate with three students per standard 39-inch-wide-seat. There are 24 seats on the BOCES bus, which means it can hold up to 72 students.
“When school started, we had 58 students assigned to the bus to go to BOCES,” Erceg said. “If there’s two to a seat, which is ideal, it’s 48 students.”
Erceg added that the same is true of all of the district’s larger buses, some carrying even more students, yet all are still below the legal capacity.
“We have bus runs on a daily basis at the high school level that have 60 students assigned to the bus,” Erceg said. “Do 60 students always get on the bus every morning? No they do not. But that is kind of within our tolerance of enrollment on a bus per se.”
The superintendent added that the complexities of a school district’s transportation routes and the budget they must operate within means that some students may not ride buses with the “ideal number” of passengers.
“We’re trying to get to that kind of ideal number, having two kids to a seat, Erceg said. “But there may still be a possibility where there could be three kids sitting in a seat throughout the bus. Not every seat is filled with three students, but there could be a handful of seats with three students.”
School districts like Saugerties contract with bus companies prior to the start of a new school year, with routes and busing needs based upon, among other things, student population from school to school. But what happens if there’s a sudden influx of students during a school year? And what if the number of SHS students attending BOCES rises above the legal maximum to ride a single bus?
“That’s a little bit of a tricky question,” Erceg said. “Part of that is seeing if BOCES actually has space in their program, so it’s not necessarily a clear cut answer. But if so, that is going to come down to our contracts that we have with our contractors, as well as bus availability, as well as driver availability.”
Erceg added that while individual buses can make separate runs for the district’s elementary and secondary needs, that’s not the case for the morning BOCES route.
“The morning run for BOCES is particularly challenging in a sense that every bus that we have contracted is being used because we’re transporting students to all of our buildings in the morning,” he said. That pressure lessens later in the day. “In the afternoon, we’re able to have two buses for the fact that we had a bus run that leaves mid-morning to go and then return prior to the high school dismissal. So physically we have available buses. Right now at this time, we did not have that luxury in the morning.”
With regard to reports of BOCES students sitting on one another’s laps or on the floor on the morning bus, Erceg said he hasn’t seen evidence to support that.
“I want to be careful that we’re not really using the word overcrowding,” Erceg said. “But when our staff goes on there in the morning to send them off, they have not reported to me that kids are sitting four to a seat nor sitting on the floor for that matter.”
The superintendent acknowledged that even with students allowed to sit three to a seat, for high school students that might be awkward or uncomfortable. He said the district is in talks with Ulster BOCES to see if there are ways to get ridership on the morning bus closer to the ideal number. One way of making that happen is that BOCES will now allow students from Saugerties High to drive themselves to class if they choose. District officials are also seeing if it might be possible to switch some students’ BOCES schedules from morning to afternoon classes.
Erceg said that district officials and BOCES would continue working together on the morning bus. He added that despite it being early in the school year, the rest of the district’s bus routes have reported comparably smooth sailing.
“We have an amazing transportation department that works constantly on trying to making sure everybody’s in the right spots and the routes are going on time,” Erceg said. “Right now, we’re kind of in the fine tuning phase of making sure that our buses leave our elementary schools at the right time so they get back to the high school for the late run. So we’re really about getting people comfortable with the flow of how things are going to work. And we’re trying to refine it and be more efficient, but that’s an ongoing process.”
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