Macomb School District 185 has contracted out its bus services for more than 30 years.
But school board members believe Durham School Services, the district’s current transportation provider, has not lived up to expectations. So board members are making a change.
They voted 7 to 0 to have the district handle its own bus services beginning July 1, 2025.
Organizing the new bus system will require a quick turnaround. Director of Operations Scott Schauble thinks they can make it work.
“The biggest challenge, like with any district, is going to be finding bus drivers. And we developed some secondary systems to have back-up drivers to basically grab the pool of people that we already have here in the district and use that resource,” he said.
Schauble initially had concerns about the feasibility of bringing the bus services in-house. But he felt better about it after a trip to Canton Union School District 66 to observe their operations.
“Once we went through that, I was able to see how the layout, the routing systems that they use. It’s definitely something that we can make work,” he said.
Canton runs its own bus service, as does every other district in the area served by Regional Office of Education 26, which includes Fulton, Hancock, McDonough, and Schuyler counties.
Superintendent Patrick Twomey said they chose to visit Canton because its enrollment is similar in size to Macomb’s.
“We made a day-long trip to Canton to really take a deep dive. We talked to their finance people in Canton. We talked to their superintendent,” he said.
Twomey estimated Macomb will save nearly $380,000 over what it would have paid Durham next school year, though one-time startup expenses will eat into that figure.
“There is bound to be things that we have missed, but we have really taken a lot of time and reviewed this,” Twomey said.
The startup expenses include bus routing software and two-way CB radios for each vehicle.
The Macomb district acquired 18 of its own buses for the current school year. The district will lease the buses for three years, with the option to buy them after that. The first-year cost was $642,000.
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