Long Bus Routes Trigger Blues

By Laura Hancock Deseret Morning News

EAGLE MOUNTAIN — Since the new year began in the Alpine School District on Aug. 18, kindergartners who live on the eastern edge of Eagle Mountain ride the bus 1 1/2 hours home from Harvest Elementary.

They come home exhausted and flushed from the heat.

The problem is more pressing for Sandy Bastian’s daughter, who has diabetes and is dependent on insulin.

“The danger is she could go so low (in blood sugar levels), she could pass out and have seizures,” said Bastian, who lives in Eagle Mountain’s Silver Lake subdivision.

Amy Callahan, who also lives in Silver Lake, said Harvest Elementary, at 2105 N. Providence Drive in Saratoga Springs, is only about 10 minutes away by car.

“There is one bus to bring all the kindergartners home, and the school boundaries are so big,” she said.

Throughout the Alpine School District, bus rides this year are longer. Some buses are so packed that students have to stand, and band instruments are stacked in the walkways.

That’s because the district is short 24 buses, business administrator Rob Smith said.

The district ordered the $107,000 buses several months ago from Georgia and was told they would arrive Sept. 17, Smith said.

Part of the reason the buses are late is because of a recall of fuel pumps, said Granite School District transportation director Tom Given, who experienced the same problem when ordering new buses in his district but received them on time because he ordered them two weeks earlier than Alpine.

Granite is lending five buses to Alpine. But that won’t entirely meet Alpine’s need.

This year, about 21,000 of Alpine’s 55,000 students ride buses, up 1,000 students from last year.

“When we were looking at what we needed, we did some projections and looked at how many routes we needed to add,” said Vicki Beecher, a transportation coordinator for Alpine. “We knew we had to add about 18 new routes, and that was all the ‘spare’ buses.”

School districts try to keep extra buses at the garage for transportation for field trips and sports games and in case a regular bus breaks down.

Once the two dozen buses arrive, the Alpine District will re- evaluate routes.

“We’re going to try to take care of the worst overcrowding,” Beecher said.

The Harvest Hills kindergartner route should only take about one hour, but often in the first days of school kindergarten routes take longer, Beecher said.

Anxious parents wait at bus stops for their children and hold the bus with questions for drivers, Beecher said.

“We expected 18 students (on the Harvest Elementary kindergarten route) and we ended up having in the neighborhood of 30,” Beecher said. “Now that we have more students, we’ll be creating new routes so the kids won’t be on the bus so long.”

Meantime, Bastian just has to make sure her daughter gets a good lunch when she arrives home from kindergarten. They check her blood sugar levels after she eats.

Bastian’s part-time job prevents her from being able to pick her daughter up after school.

She recently learned that the driver may reverse the route so her daughter is one of the first to arrive home, but she doesn’t feel comfortable with that.

“I have a health situation,” she said. “That’s not right for kids on the reverse end of the route.”

E-mail: lhancock@desnews.com

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