Transportation Details

We need to rethink transportation for our students. Here is a proposal to optimize our bussing strategy. It was specifically designed to fit our regional choice model, but it could easily be adapted to be used in other models.

Goals

  • Improve reliability of transportation

  • Reduce cost per child

  • Reduce time spent on busses

  • Offer bussing to ALL of our PPS students without needing to rely upon PRT

  • Consider bussing issues a solvable problem, rather than structuring PPS around that problem

Concept

  • Use our school buildings and community hubs as transportation drop and pickup points, then move students from hubs to their schools

  • Kids walk to their closest school or regional community hub, assuming it is within the walking distance standards (1.5 miles)

  • Provide before, after school care as well as meal enrichment at regional school-community hub

  • Stagger start times of PreK-5, 6-8 and 9-12 in a new way to allow bussing of all students without relying on PRT

Transportation Hubs

We propose utilizing many of our buildings as transportation hubs, in order to cover most of the city with the PPS standard 1.5 mile walkable zones. Kids would be expected to walk to their local hub if they fall within its walking region, no matter what school they are heading to. These hubs are already staffed by PPS, so it allows for care of students during any transportation wait times.

Our busses would pick up the few remaining kids that are not covered by these walking zones, and bring them to the local school/hub. Then they would pick up a large number of kids from that hub and take them directly to their destination school - this makes for short bus ride, easier for driver, less behavioral challenges on long bus rides, etc. We can use large busses and fewer drivers to move more kids from their neighborhood hub to their school, rather than a lot of small busses and more drivers to move kids from their bus stops to all over the city.

Walking Zones

The image below on the right shows approximated walking zones around every elementary school in our proposal. Our Elementary Schools are a logical starting point as we have far more elementary schools than other grade levels. Our proposal prioritized trying to have schools as evenly distributed across the city as possible, working with the locations of our existing buildings, so this gives us pretty good coverage of the city.

The image on the left adds 4 of our regional hubs and 2 middle schools (in lighter blue circles) to fill in some gaps. These circles are a 1 mile radius, meant to approximate the real world walking zone of 1.5 mile walking distances when traveling on real roads. It is obviously a rough approximation and more detailed work would need to be done with the actual walking zone data for each building. This is the highest fidelity model we could create with the data we have.

Staggered Start Times

PPS currently has 4 staggered start times to accommodate getting everyone where they need to go with less busses all operating at the same time. Our proposal changes this to likely 3 start times - one for each grade configuration (PreK-5, 6-8 and 9-12). Students that need transportation would walk or be dropped off at a hub in time for their bus. Elementary students would be shuttled from their hub to their actual elementary school. That bus would pick up middle school students who were gathered there since it was their hub, and take them to their actual school. And so on. Any needed schools could function as hubs, so bussing can be streamlined around the region, and can include our older students without relying on PRT.

By utilizing a regional model, we do not need to move kids as far across the city compared to the current magnet system. We can keep costs reasonable while allowing more options for school choice, and we should be able to get to the point of affordably and efficiently bussing all of our kids.

Additional Benefits

  • Parents don’t have to be delayed by late bus

  • Can have before and after care options at their school or at local hub - more options for more scenarios.

  • Use similar model for charter/private school students PPS is obligated by law to bus - greater efficiency

  • Bussing becomes more efficient, especially at younger ages translating to less time on the bus for our littlest riders.

In House Bussing

We envision a future where PPS handles a lot of the bussing in house, and can provide bussing to all students of all grade levels. We also recognize benefits for many families of having a PRT pass. Consideration of ways to offer this service to those who need it, or offer some kind of discount, should be considered by the district if we are able to meet the goal of bussing all kids without relying on PRT for school-day transit.

By taking control of transportation again, we can better serve our students and families, while also responding directly to driver shortages (not be reliant on service providers to do so), and leveraging the time, talents, etc of our drivers to provide additional needed services to the district in their awkward off hours in the middle of the day. This could be reading to kids, just being extra eyes on recess, delivering food/supplies that other PPS staff do now, or whatever else we can think of.

Take Control of Transportation

We should not build our educational model around a problem that we can take control of and fix. We can and must do better than our existing system of transportation to be able to have an effective restructuring of the district. The two work hand in hand.