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School board considers two busing options for district
By Rebecca Ray
The little yellow school bus may no longer be a thing of the past.
At the April 17 Saratoga Union School District board meeting, a transportation consultant presented the board with two options for a busing system in Saratoga. One option, with an estimated cost for each student bus rider of about $1,100 a year, involves eight buses servicing the district. The other less expensive option, estimated to cost each rider about $820 a year or $3 each way, involves six buses.
The district hired R & D Transportation to develop a "busing implementation feasibility" plan, in the hope of bringing busing back to Saratoga and reducing traffic.
District officials prepared a proposal request for potential vendors. The proposal is due back at the end of the month.
District officials will also survey parents whose children attend district schools to determine how many parents would be interested in their children riding buses. Board members should know by June how feasible a busing program is, Superintendent Mary Gardner said. She added that, if a busing program does seem feasible, board members can decide which busing option--if either--to choose.
The more expensive option would involve two buses servicing Argonaut Elementary School, three servicing Redwood Middle School and three servicing both Foothill and Saratoga Elementary schools. Foothill and Saratoga Elementary would share buses, because their ridership populations being intermingled, Gardner said. Schools would start at the same times as they do this year, and the longest one-way trip for a student would last 30 to 35 minutes, according to Gardner.
The less expensive option would involve changing the starting times of two or three schools, Gardner said, with the longest trip still being 30 to 35 minutes long.
R & D Transportation bases costs on the assumption that 500 students will ride the buses. According to Gardner, the district needs 486 riders to begin the busing program.
At the meeting, consultant Sorhab Rashid of Fehr and Peers Associates also recommended how traffic problems around Redwood School could be improved. District and city officials are following Rashid's recommendations by discussing the development of another turnaround on Allendale, the changing of curbs and ballards to improve queuing for pickups and drop-offs and the installation of a median on Fruitvale to make turns safer, Gardner said.
Rashid decided to postpone making recommendations for Saratoga Elementary, until workers finish construction, which Gardner hopes will be sometime this month.
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Saratoga, California Since 1955
