National Guard Bus Drivers Will Be Called Into Revere to Handle Bus Driver Shortage

Ahead of the 2021/2022 school year, Revere Public Schools (RPS) made some changes to the  transportation policy for middle and high school students.

After conducting a survey with parents over the summer, RPS and the Revere School Committee decided only those high school students who live two miles or more from RHS or Seacoast are eligible for school transportation and only those middle school students who live one mile or more from their middle school are eligible for public school transportation. This was done to free up some buses that serve not only middle school and high school students but also elementary school students in Revere.

However, once the school year began RPS administrators realized the city was not immune to the bus driver shortage plaguing the rest of the state.

“We’ve experienced some challenges with transportation as we opened the school year that is not unique to Revere but a trend that has been experienced across the Commonwealth and across the country,” said RPS Superintendent Dr. Dianne Kelly at last Tuesday evening’s School Committee Meeting. “We’ve been working very hard with our transportation vendor to help iron out some issues.”

RPS Assistant Superintendent Dr. Richard Gallucci, who had been working with the RPS transportation department ahead of the school year, said the department figured 25 buses would be enough to cover transportation but learned very quickly during the first weeks of school the district would need close to 31 buses to cover all the schools and the riders at each school.

“When we kind of delve into the ‘why’? certainly there was some ridership increase,” said Gallucci. “The Extended Learning Time schools’ arrival and dismissal time now align with other schools and prevent us from having buses do a second run that they typically would have done in years previous. The big ticket item was that traffic in the city really prevented any type of double run within a 25 minute window. So, when we entered the year, we had buses scheduled to service a middle school, drop all of the children off, circle back around to the elementary schools, which was getting out 25 minutes later, then drop all those children off to complete that double run but it was just not realistic.”

Gallucci explained that the buses were arriving very late at the elementary schools and children were arriving home too late.

“We quickly learned that we had to really expand the amount of buses,” said Gallucci. “So we went through an early expansion and after going through some personnel changes we were able to kind of tackle some of the issues that existed in terms of the planned routes.”

For example, by combining some routes RPS was able to go from four buses down to two buses for the Whalen School and two buses down to one at the Paul Revere and Lincoln Schools.

Revere also accepted help from the Massachusetts National Guard, who was called into cities like Chelsea and Lawrence by Gov. Charlie Baker to address the bus driver shortage.

“You may have heard about this in the news about the National Guard offering to help support districts that are struggling with transportation,” said Gallucci. “We are at the very final stages of confirming that partnership. We’re actually going to be getting three licensed drivers from the National Guard. What this will do for us is give us some flexibility with drivers and monitors that are currently driving vans. We had two vans that were unoccupied so they’ll take over those vans and be able to provide further transportation support and complete runs within our school district. They will require a monitor and they will be wearing uniforms. We’re going to make families aware so they’re not surprised when those (National Guard) drivers arrive to pick up their children.”

While Gallucci said RPS will continue hiring efforts to further support the city’s school transportation needs Gallucci said the one thing he realized from this issue is that the process of preparation has to be a lot more extensive.

“It has to be a lot more tighter so that we go into the school year knowing what our ridership is, understanding who is taking what bus, and really giving families more information ahead of the school year,” he said. “Looking at our routes I think we’ve learned from this year that we may have had some routes that could have been consolidated had we known about ridership. We could have also been looking at maps and asking, “Okay these two buses are heading in the same direction, is this an instance where we can have children on the bus and not overextend ourselves in terms of the number of buses that we need for the district?”  I think these are all things that we are going to start now in preparing for next year as opposed to waiting until the end of the school year and then starting to prep. I think we got a good handle on our transportation needs this year and I think we’re going to use that data and certainly build upon it as we learn more.”