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School district hopes to improve bus driver training

Kile Brewer
Posted 1/24/18

GREEN COVE SPRINGS – The Clay County School Board will vote on an expedited bus driver training program among other things at its upcoming Feb. 1 meeting.

During Tuesday morning’s agenda …

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School district hopes to improve bus driver training


Posted

GREEN COVE SPRINGS – The Clay County School Board will vote on an expedited bus driver training program among other things at its upcoming Feb. 1 meeting.

During Tuesday morning’s agenda review, dubbed a School Board Workshop by the district, board members met with Superintendent Addison Davis and staff to sort out the agenda for the next meeting. During these workshops, Davis and the board can have a more open discussion of the agenda items and get some of the discussion out of the way to allow for efficiency during official meetings.

One of the items that will be appearing on the next consent agenda is a program suggested by Davis to free up two employees to train new bus drivers full time. The funding for the initiative came after the district’s transportation director resigned and was replaced on an interim basis with a supervisor from the same department. Since that supervisor position will sit vacant until the interim director can resume his duties, the salary would sit unused. Instead Davis proposed that the district use that former salary to fund the two training positions.

“Right now, it’s taking six to eight weeks to train bus drivers,” Davis said. “The individuals that are providing the [training] are driving all morning, and then they have a two-hour window where they can do training, and then they’re driving again.”

Davis said that with full time training personnel, they could train new drivers in two weeks. The program would be a no-risk pilot program since it is cost neutral through the end of this budgeted year. Depending on the success of the program, Davis said they could adopt this model and budget for the two training positions before the next school year.

“We’re always looking to add substitute bus drivers,” Davis said. “We want to have 25 and right now we have about 17-20.”

Davis also discussed the removal of a portable classroom from Fleming Island Elementary School that had burned earlier in the month when students were not in school. A custodian had set the classroom’s heater to the emergency heat setting, which caused the 26-year-old wood frame structure to catch fire. A teacher was working on campus and noticed the smoke before calling the fire department.

“We’re lucky we caught it early with all the portables in the area,” Davis said. “We need to get it out of here as soon as we can.”

The teacher who was working out of the classroom was relocated in what Davis called a seamless transition and once the burned classroom has been removed it will be replaced at a cost of about $37,000, Davis said.

After the agenda review, Davis brought another item to the attention of the board that will be added to the agenda and heard again at the Feb. 1 meeting. Davis invited two representatives from the Clay County Utility Authority to speak to the board about potentially purchasing a plot of land that sits behind Tynes Elementary School between the school and Jennings State Forest. The plot is currently enclosed and inaccessible to anyone in the school district and would house CCUA water tanks. It was formerly the home to the school’s septic tank system which is currently not in use. All remediation costs associated with septic cleanup would be covered by CCUA’s construction costs.

In the proposed plan, CCUA would move horizontal tanks that currently sit near the entrance to the school to the property behind the school. At first, they would only install a single tank that would be between 25 and 30 feet tall and one pump house that would be soundproofed so as not to disturb the school or the homes nearby. The size of the property, however, would allow the utility authority to expand and add two additional tanks as the population grows in the area.

CCUA has proposed a $30,000 purchase amount to the board for the property. The board seemed interested in the idea and asked that they have representatives present at the February meeting when they could formally make action on the deal.