As the Sedona-Oak Creek School District moves forward with closing Big Park Community School, district administration has begun examining the logistics of bringing all of its elementary students to one location.

In public feedback sessions during the discussions to close a school, one issue several speakers mentioned was lengthy bus rides between the Village of Oak Creek and West Sedona School.

Transportation director Vicki Gann has put together a bus schedule for next school year detailing routes and times, which she and  West Sedona School Principal Scott Keller presented to the SOCSD Governing Board during a meeting May 7.

The longest route this new schedule proposes is 50 minutes from the Village to West Sedona School, with an additional 13 minutes to Sedona Red Rock High School after that. The buses on this route will be for kindergarteners through 12th graders in the morning, while elementary and high school routes will be separate in the afternoon.

In addition to the kindergarten through 12th-grade buses, Gann has proposed providing a kindergarten through sixth-grade shuttle that will run from Weber’s IGA in the Village to West Sedona School, with no additional stops in the morning. This shuttle is scheduled to take about 20 minutes in the morning. Stops added on the shuttle’s afternoon route bump the ride up to about 30 minutes.

“The only time we have issues here is during spring break,” Gann said. “Even looking at my GPS, the buses here are leaving early enough that they’re not getting affected.”

She said five or 10 minutes might get added on to the bus times during spring break season when tourists are more numerous.

According to the current routes listed on the district’s website, the longest Big Park Community School route is about 35 minutes, the longest West Sedona School route is about the same and the longest high school bus route is about an hour for this school year.

The district also operates a bus route on State Route 89A into Oak Creek Canyon, which runs longer than the other bus routes.

Safety First

Beyond the length of time kids could be spending on buses, parents voiced concerns about safety, especially in regard to having buses where kindergarteners could potentially mingle with 12th graders.

The only time elementary students are on the same bus as high schoolers is during the morning Village routes, which typically have lower ridership than afternoon routes.

“Mostly you don’t have 12th and 11th graders on the bus. Most of them drive,” Gann said.

In the mornings when high schoolers and elementary students are on the bus together, they’ll be split by school: Elementary students in the front, and older kids in the back.

“We have really good kids, all the way across the board,” Gann said.

The district also has several measures in place to keep tabs on kids while they’re on buses, including cameras and Zonar, a system that monitors bus activity.

Zonar tracks all bus movement, like location, speed and when and how long it stops. It also can track students through a card scanning system. Kids are issued cards that they swipe whenever they get on and off the bus to track their bus journeys.

West Sedona School administrative assistant Amanda Raucci said the feature has come in handy a few times, like when a student didn’t return home on time and a parent didn’t know where they were. The school pulled up the record of the student’s bus ride and was able to tell the parent which stop the student got off at, prompting the parent to remember their child was going to a friend’s house that afternoon.

While only school district staff currently has access to the Zonar student tracking, the district is working on adding SafeStop, an app that allows parents to track their own children through Zonar.

Gann and Raucci said one of the biggest safety issues they have is when cars don’t observe the bus stop signs that signal when children are boarding or deboarding.

“It’s probably one of our only safety issues,” Raucci said. “It’s the other cars.” Gann added, “I’m working with the drivers all the time about safety. To me, it’s all about safety.”

Rebekah Wahlberg can be reached at 282-7795 ext. 117, or email rwahlberg@larsonnewspapers.com