Bussing Changes Due to Quarantines

Dear Mount Gilead School Community,

One of my first priorities is to keep our kids safely in school. COVID is requiring us to respond accordingly. While I'm happy to report that Friday September 24th was the first day without a single positive COVID case, we did learn that we have 3 bus drivers that are required to quarantine over the weekend. We will work with the Health Department to monitor their status and get them back to driving as soon as it is safe to do so.

Keeping students in person for learning is important to me. Due to the shortage in drivers, we're going to have to rotate routes daily while our drivers are quarantined. Unfortunately we do not have the capacity to transport all of our students. As a result, we will need to forego bussing for individual routes that will rotate daily until we have the capacity to transport all of our bus routes again. I know this creates a hardship for parents that rely on bussing for transportation. However, this strategy allows us to remain in person for all students that can be transported by bus or for those families that have the capacity to transport their own son(s)/daughter(s) impacted by the cancelled route as part of a daily rotation.

For those students that do not have the ability to be transported, the absence will be excused and we will treat their day as a remote learning day similar to how we've handled our students that have been quarantined up to this point.

While I sincerely apologize for the inconvenience to those parents that won't have bus transportation on the days specified, this allows us to remain in person for as many students as possible. I'd like to thank our staff for their flexibility - especially our transportation team that will do the best that they can. While we're at shorter bus driver capacity, we ask for your patience.

Please know that this situation is fluid and subject to change based on additional availability of drivers.

For this upcoming week (9/27-10/1), there will be no bus route for the following bus #s:

Monday-

Tuesday- Bus 13

Wednesday-

Thursday-

Friday-

The following busses will be delayed with estimated times in parenthesis as we do our best to modify routes:

Monday-Bus 15(Our bus for students with disabilities) (50-55 minutes late in morning)

Tuesday- Bus 15(Our bus for students with disabilities) (50-55 minutes late in morning)

Wednesday- Bus 15(Our bus for students with disabilities) (50-55 minutes late in morning)

Thursday- Bus 15(Our bus for students with disabilities) (50-55 minutes late in morning)

Friday- Bus 15- (Our bus for students with disabilities) (50-55 minutes late in morning)

Sincerely,

Dr. Zack Howard

MGEVSD Superintendent

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