Now that BH-BL students are back to school full time, district leaders continue to fine tune practices and protocols related to helping reduce the spread of COVID among students and staff. Upon reviewing the patterns of the past few weeks of school, district officials have learned that when students need to be placed in quarantine a majority of the time it is related to the close proximity of students on school buses.
One way to help reduce the number of students who might need to be quarantined simultaneously is to create a seating chart for each bus. Therefore, beginning Monday, Sept. 27, students’ bus drivers will implement assigned seating for all students. Siblings/family members who are in the same household will be seated together. The bus seats will be labeled with numbers and students will need to sit in their assigned seats at all times.
“Many area school districts are encountering this same challenge,” explains BH-BL Transportation Director Joe Czub. “Assigned seating is one mitigating strategy that could help us reduce quarantine numbers.”
Because BH-BL buses are at full capacity at the elementary level, school and transportation staff will work with parents/guardians who would prefer to drop their children off and pick them up from school. Please let both your child’s school and the transportation staff know of this change so bus routes can be updated and seating arrangements updated. The Transportation Department phone number is 518-399-9141, Ext. 83527. Or, Assistant Director of Transportation Christine Sarsick can be reached at csarsick@bhbl.org.
Lastly, due to assigned seating and full-capacity buses, the district will not be using bus passes for children to ride buses other than their own until further notice.