Bus Shortage Curtails After-School Activities For Middle Schoolers

The Winston-Salem/Forsyth County school district is dealing with a shortage of activity buses at middle schools, leading administrators to make tough decisions on adding sports teams or expanding tutoring programs.

And while district officials say they're looking for new solutions to the problem, they're not currently in a position to add new vehicles, even though some buses in the current fleet are decades old. 

WFDD's Sean Bueter talked to Winston-Salem Journal reporter Arika Herron about how the shortage is affecting students and what the district is doing to cope.

Interview Highlights

Why is a shortage of activity buses such a big deal?

It's an academic issue, for sure, at a lot of these schools. I talked to a principal who would love to have his students doing after school tutoring two, three days a week, but they only have one activity bus to run kids home afterwards. And the kids live in so many different areas that it was taking them over two hours to get home.

So they've had to now divide kids up among days. So if you live in this neighborhood you come to tutoring on Tuesdays. If you live in another neighborhood you come to tutoring on Wednesdays. They can get kids there but also get them home at a reasonable time. So yeah, absolutely an academic issue.

Why can't school districts simply use the yellow school buses that transport students each day?

The yellow buses are provided by the state and they're on this very strict schedule for replacement. And they can only be used for taking students to and from school during the regular school day.

So even though they're technically still at school and they'd be going home, it's outside of the purview of that regular school day. If they use the yellow buses they'd have to reimburse the state, which is pretty costly.

On a longterm plan for dealing with a shortage of activity buses:

[The school district is] looking right now at the way that the activity buses are distributed and to maybe...redistribute them in some way. Maybe a smaller high school doesn't need all seven of its buses, so they can redistribute the buses better according to need...

They're also in the beginning of their budgeting season. And once they get closer to the end of budgeting season, see what their local budget looks like. Maybe they'd be able to purchase a few more. They're also looking at maybe buying smaller activity buses. The ones they have now are all full-size and that's that $88,000 dollar price tag. There are smaller buses, though, that would cost less. Maybe you could buy a 20-person bus as opposed to a 66-person bus, that sort of thing, and be able to meet some needs at a slightly lower cost.