Justin Murphy
Rochester Democrat and Chronicle
USA TODAY NETWORK
The Greece school board Tuesday approved a set of resolutions that will make some children walk farther to their bus stop or school building, a concession to the ongoing national difficulty of finding bus drivers.
Under the new regulations, children in grades K-5 will have to walk up to two tenths of a mile to their school or bus stop. Middle schoolers will have to walk up to one mile and high schoolers will have to walk up to 1.5 miles. Exceptions will be made for crossing high-traffic streets.
‘We have overserviced in terms of what we have provided people,’ Superintendent Kathleen Graupman said. ‘That’s nice to be able to do, but we’re not in a position to continue to do that.’
The changes will reduce the district’s transportation burden by 16 routes, Transportation Director David Richardson said. They will take effect in September.
School districts across the U.S. have been struggling to recruit school bus drivers, in particular since COVID-19. Greece employs 130 drivers today, down from 160 in 2019, Richardson said.
The district has dealt with buses arriving late for children in the morning and has had to cancel after-school activities due to a lack of drivers, Graupman said.
In January Greece announced it would stop busing international students to private schools based on a technical reading of the law and the word ‘resident.’
RCSD, too, has struggled to get children to school on time due to a lack of bus drivers. Rochester and Greece are the two largest school districts in Monroe County and two of the largest in New York, with transportation concerns greatly more complex than in smaller districts.
‘Hard times call for hard measures,’ Richardson said, ‘and that’s what we’re looking to do.’