GCCC bus situation clarified

On Thursday, I got a phone call from Schools Treasurer Joy Kitzmiller. In covering School Board meetings for the News for a couple years, I learned that Kitzmiller is the genuine article. She is both extremely good at her job and about the nicest person you could hope to meet.

She started out by saying she knew no better way to start the conversation than to jump right in. Oh boy, I thought, she must have been offended by something I wrote in this blog. But she was the one who apologized. She said she was sorry for not having spoken up at the School Board meeting when I raised the issue of Greene County Career Center students having been bused recently without any notice to the parents. She said she had worked with Schools Superintendent Norm Glismann on the recent revisions to the schedule, and since she has been around a lot longer than he has, was advising him based on what had been done in the past.

According to Kitzmiller, due to pressures put on the four-school-bus schedule by special needs students having to be bused to other districts from time-to-time, it had been common practice in the past to transport a few Career Center students on the same bus with Mills Lawn kids. Usually, there would be only one or two Career Center students on the bus, she said. This year, she said, the early situation with special needs kids and the change to a later YSHS start time resulted in a greater accommodation to Career Center students and some of them were being picked up near their homes. According to Kitzmiller, state law only requires that Career Center students be bused from their home school, in this case Yellow Springs High School.

The recent situation came about when one special needs kid started to attend a program in Beavercreek. With the busing of several other students to different districts, this, apparently, was the straw that broke the camel’s back. The sudden change in the schedule was nothing more than going back to the previous practice, Kitzmiller said. I have no reason to doubt her.

The problem, she acknowledged, was that parents of GCCC kids were not notified in advance. This, she said, may have been due to that fact that the transportation coordinator is new at this job. I can add that when I called the School Board offices before the recent meeting, the transportation coordinator was extremely apologetic for not having called the parents.

According to Kitzmiller, the recent change back to the schedule that was implemented at the beginning of the year came about because the student who needed to be bused to Beavercreek, suddenly no longer needed to go there. However, she said, there remained the possibility of another student needing to be bused to another district starting in the beginning of January. She said she will be sure parents will be notified if this comes about.

Kitzmiller, who, in my opinion, has been a good steward of school tax revenues, is always keeping an eye on the bottom line. That’s her job and we are lucky to have her. According to her, school buses get about five to six miles-per-gallon. So it makes sense that she takes an interest in the routing of school buses.