P-J photo by Cameron Hurst

Since the beginning of his superintendent tenure almost eight weeks ago, Dr. Kevin Whitaker admitted that engaging in a safe plan to return to school in the fall has led him to expand his vocabulary with new terminology.

“One of those terms is ‘dwell time,'” said Whitaker, referring to the amount of time between cleaning a surface and polishing it off.

Districts in Chautauqua County each are considering “dwell time” in their plans to reopen schools while at the same time preventing an outbreak and resurgence of COVID-19 and besides school buildings themselves, no locale poses larger public health and logistical threats to a return to in-person education than district-provided transportation — namely, school buses.

“The bus is difficult for social distancing,” Southwestern Central School District Transportation Supervisor John Spacht said. “It’s a pretty confined space and designed to haul 66 elementary kids. If you put those kids in a six-foot space between every student that’s only six kids on there. That’s impossible. … You can’t get kids to school that way.”

Calling the school bus “an extension of the classroom,” the state board of regents and education department is requiring districts to, among other things, “perform regular school bus disinfection measures; train students and school bus staff regarding social distancing on the bus, at stops, and at unloading times; and train students and staff regarding the wearing of masks.” Both students and drivers are also required to wear masks and social distance on the bus.

Jamestown Public Schools Transportation Supervisor Daniel Lemk stands in the district’s bus garage on Allen Street as districts across Chautauqua County prepare to send students back to school in three weeks. P-J photo by Cameron Hurst

Spacht is one of the many transportation supervisors who have read the state’s guidelines to reopening backward and forward since it was released to administrators on July 14. He’s also served on different committees and workgroups locally and statewide trying to figure out the easiest way for school districts to address this issue.

“A school’s job is to educate the students,” Spacht said. “Most of the time when you get these people in Albany putting out guidelines, they’re not thinking about the operations side of education, they’re thinking about how we are going to get the students the best education possible. The operations part comes later. We wanted, as transport professionals, to give them what we need to look at from the transportation side and operation side.”

He added, “There’s a lot more to educating the students than sitting in a classroom … All of that has to come into play.”

Spacht and his colleagues have tried to think of everything: pickup routes, assigned seats, loading procedures and paths, and anything in between. But, even those thoughts have created additional thoughts.

“Originally, we were hoping to load the busses from the back to the front so that no one would have to cross,” he said. “But, then you have students sitting toward the back that are closer together for a longer period of time, so more and more thought goes into it.”

Students will be required to wear a mask on the bus — but state law maintains that no one can be denied transportation, thus causing a separate issue.

“What we’ve decided to do is if we have a student who either cannot wear or will not wear, we’ll have to send a different bus,” Spacht said. “They’ll only be allowed six on a full-size bus. If there’s no mask, you have to make sure every direction possible is six feet. … You can’t jeopardize all the other students on a bus, so, unfortunately, we’d have to send a totally separate bus.”

Whitaker, however, students in his district might not even arrive at the bus equipped with a mask.

“Maybe in wealthier districts, there can be an expectation that parents provide their child their own masks,” he said. “We can’t make that assumption. We need to make sure we have enough PPE so that we can provide them to kids who don’t have them. If a kid shows up and they don’t have the means, we’ll provide them a mask.”

Then, comes, the issue of student traffic on the bus.

Frewsburg Central School Superintendent Shelly O’Boyle told The Post-Journal that her district should be able to reduce bus traffic due to parents that have stepped up to provide transportation for their child as indicated in a survey the district put out to gauge a response.

“Results indicated that 77% of the parents that participated in the survey were willing and able to assist the district,” said O’Boyle, whose district is one of a handful that are planning on conducting in-person classes five days a week. “The district will be conducting a more formal commitment process in the next few weeks. Obviously, the district understands its responsibility to provide transportation and will do so; however, the 77% of parents stating that they would assist with transportation goes to show how the Frewsburg community comes together in times of need.

Still, O’Boyle said, “Even with assistance from parents, transportation is definitely going to be a challenge in terms of reopening.”

Chautauqua Lake Central School, another district that will attend school in-person five days a week, will ask parents to check-in on their student’s health statistics every morning 30 minutes prior to getting on the bus or going to school, using an app called Frontline, which provides real-time data of the daily health screening to verify completion of the health screening. Like other districts, students who are members of the same household will sit together on the bus.

Whitaker, meanwhile, said the district is still trying to figure out how to reduce inevitable traffic that will come from health screenings before a student enters the school building.

“We’re thinking about having temperature checks, either spot checks or full checks on busses,” he said. “We want to reduce the chance of crowding at the doors of schools because we have to do temperature checks and screenings at some point. Even with partial enrollments in-person, there are still kids coming in at different doors. We want to lessen the amounts of kids specifically, that will help the flow. That first step may be on the bus.”

Transportation personnel will also be responsible for making sure students are not exhibiting any symptoms.

“Drivers and aides will be looking for the certification from parents that kids don’t ahve symptoms and aren’t out of the country or the state,” Whitaker said. “They’ll be checking for those and at the end of the run, drivers and aides will clean the surfaces and after the ‘dwell time,’ they’ll do a sweep of the bus so that things aren’t wet or sticky or gross.”

Spacht, meanwhile, knows that adding more bus runs will be inevitable with only 22 students on a 66-passenger bus.

“Last year, we had 16 regular runs and two runs that went around to different locations for homeless students,” he said. “This year, I don’t know what that’s going to look like.”

Pine Valley Central School Superintendent Bryna Booth has a rough idea of what it will look like in her district, who will stagger start times for students due to the transportation question.

“Based on the guidelines, we have bus routes where we will do a double loop,” she said. “First all of our elementary students will be picked up, they’ll come in with a staggering drop off time to allow them to have as close to a normal-length day as possible. Then the high school students will come — they’ll have a shorter day but they’ll have remote learning on each end of their day.”

The reason: older students are needed for their siblings.

“Our families, the older students really need to be home to watch younger brothers and sisters and they are able to cope with remote learning better than a first grader can,” she added.

Still, these changes and the adherence to guidelines do not happen in a vacuum and while Whitaker is confident in his district’s ability to provide the tools necessary in the short term, he fears what could happen in the longterm, especially if an impending 20% cut in state aid comes.

“The short term funds are there,” he said. “We hope for reimbursement from FEMA for our costs from the spring and the COVID-related pandemic stuff but after that, it becomes a question. My hope is that we don’t have to be in that protocol pretty soon and that we’ll be able to relax the number of limitations and that we’ll have more and more people back and be able to transition back.”