No Sugarcoating: LTHS Bus Problems Persist

La Grange IL

18 October, 2021

7:24 PM

Description

LA GRANGE, IL – Lyons Township High School's bus contractor has made progress in improving service, but problems continue, an official said Monday. The contractor, First Student, informed the school last week that it was down 37 drivers, a slight improvement from the beginning of the year, said Greg Gardner, assistant principal at the school's South Campus, who oversees the bus contract. First Student has several new drivers in training, which takes five to six weeks. Because Lyons Township starts at 7:45 a.m., all of its routes arrive at school on time, while most other schools still experience consistent delays every day of the week, Gardner said in a public statement. Because of a later start time on Wednesdays, Lyons Township continues to experience delays because of routes before its own, Gardner said. Over the past three weeks, though, the school has seen an 82 percent improvement in its arrival times on Wednesdays, with no missed routes in the last week, he said. Meanwhile, the school's afternoon routes continue to see delays in departure times as a result of the tiered system with other local schools because of the driver shortage, Gardner said. The school has seen an improvement with an average of 35 percent of buses leaving in under 10 minutes from published departure times, up from 18 percent, he said. "We acknowledge that we still have a significant number of students waiting for their buses to arrive," Gardner said. With the change in weather, Gardner said, the school is working on a system for notifying students who are waiting indoors for their buses. Once it is finalized, the process will be shared with students, he said. Last week, Lyons Township asked First Student to conduct another head count to see whether more routes could be consolidated to improve arrival and departure times on late start Wednesdays and afternoons.