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Officials address school busing concerns

By Patrick Adrian
[email protected]
CLAREMONT — Student transportation remains a central concern as Claremont schools prepare to resume full-time in-person instruction on Oct. 19, according to district administrators.

A recent survey of Claremont families indicates an overwhelming preference to return their children to in-person instruction full-time, with nearly 94% surveyed parents saying they will choose the full-time in-person option over moving to full-time remote learning. Only 38 of the 615 responses said they wish to switch their children from the current hybrid instructional model to the full-time remote option.

But many families in the Stevens High School community are displeased by the district’s decision to stop providing bus transportation to the high school population.

District administrators and school board members said on Wednesday that they have fielded many concerns and complaints from parents that their high schoolers have no other means to travel to school, especially once Stevens High School resumes its own full-time in-person schedule on Nov. 9.

“By taking away busing we are inadvertently creating a barrier for students who want to come to school,” said Mimi Rhines, a school counselor at Stevens High School.

Many Stevens High School students do not have driver’s licenses or a vehicle to drive themselves, Rhines pointed out. While some students could potentially walk to school, that option is not feasible for students living in the town’s rural outskirts, where the walk to school can take at least an hour and the roads are often unsafe for pedestrian travel, especially during the winter.

Though a family survey in July indicated that about half of surveyed families said they could provide their own transportation to and from school, Assistant Superintendent Donna Magoon noted that the survey response was based on when students were only doing in-person learning two days per week, not five.

“I’ve had phone calls with parents saying that when it was only two days per week they were able to swing it,” Magoon told the board. “Now that it’s moving to five days, they can’t.”

Superintendent Michael Tempesta has stated since August that transportation would be a major obstacle to fully resuming in-person instruction. Current state guidelines restrict the school bus capacity to about 24 students and allow only one student per seat or two students if they are from the same family.

Some Claremont buses served up to 60 students prior to the pandemic, according to Tempesta.

By law, school districts are only required to provide bus transportation to students in grades K through 8. Unless the state eases its capacity limit, the district currently lacks the buses to add additional routes and the buses will be at full-capacity with the anticipated numbers of elementary and middle schoolers.

If the state lifts its bus restrictions at some point, the district could foreseeably increase the average ridership to about 35 or 40 students, though Tempesta said that is impossible to guarantee at the present.

Perhaps one hopeful outlook is the district has trained two additional drivers, who are currently employed as substitutes. Additionally Claremont voters in March approved the appropriation of $500,000 to a capital reserve to purchase new vehicles over the next few years.

In a separate action on Wednesday the school board approved the district to spend $247,000 from that fund to acquire two new school buses and one van.

The new buses are intended to replace the district’s two oldest buses, one of which is near the end of its usability. The second bus being replaced is for special education students though still “has some life left to it” and could be retained in the district garage for limited uses, said Finance Director Richard Seaman.

The district did not indicate whether these vehicles could fulfill the role of additional routes or when they could be purchased and added to the fleet.

New schedules will include early dismissal for middle and high schoolers

School administrators aim to change the dismissal time of students in Claremont Middle School and Stevens High School to allow adequate time for teachers to meet with their students still learning remotely after Oct. 19.

Claremont Principal Frank Romeo and Assistant Principal Audra Bucklin presented a revamped version of the middle school schedule, which the administrators plan to phase-in following the return of full-time in-person instruction.

Under the new schedule students attending in-person will be dismissed daily at 1:40 p.m., rather than the current dismissal time of 2:30 p.m. This additional 35 minutes will allow teachers to meet with their remote students between 1:40 to 2:30 p.m.

Currently teachers meet with their fully remote students on Wednesdays, which is a remote day for all students in the districts. But with students returning to school for five days per week, Romeo said they needed to find a way to keep that connection with their remote learners.

“There are [remote] students that we have not seen since mid-march,” Romeo told the board. “Some of them are brand new to our building. They are still our students.”

The schedule is designed so that each remote student meets with a different content teacher each weekday afternoon, as opposed to checking in with all one’s teachers on the same day.

To accommodate the early dismissal the school had to drop the last period of the day, which was scheduled for project-based learning.

Project-based learning is a collaborative, hands-on model in which a group of students undertake a real-world project, often one that addresses an existing problem or need in the community. The students work together to develop, plan and implement their project while applying their knowledge and skills from multiple areas of learning.

Romeo said dropping the project based learning block was difficult, the school plans to integrate project based learning units into the main courses.

“It’s not an easy decision, but we’re just going to need to reinvent it in our classrooms,” Romeo said. “It will not go away.”

Additionally, the new schedule will restore the block that students previously had for activities like band or chorus, Romeo said. Students have not had this in-person opportunity since the pandemic closed schools in March.

Romeo said these new schedules will not take effect on Oct. 19, because the teachers will need a period of adjustment. The principal said it will take approximately two weeks to phase in.

Dismissal for in-person students at Stevens High School will eventually be at 2:04 p.m. instead of 2:21 p.m. Tempesta said the schedule is similar in structure to the middle school’s in that the last period of the day is dropped and that time will allow teachers to meet with their remote students.

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