Putnam County Schools Transportation Director Ron Chaffin said that the school system’s buses are ready to take on the new school year.
Chaffin said that before the previous school year ended, he began evaluating which buses would need the most maintenance over the summer. Chaffin said it takes the whole summer to complete maintenance on all 80 buses.
“It’s just like any vehicle that we got,” Chaffin said. “Anytime you know, a lot of time you’ve got to do oil changes and tires, and that type of thing, but we kind of save those bigger items for the summer in order to get them ready for the following school year.”
Chaffin said this year, the school system is fully staffed with bus drivers. Chaffin said the school system has not made any major bus route changes for the school year.
“We never know until after the beginning of the year what kind of changes we are gonna have to make depending on where people move around to different locations,” Chaffin said. “But as of right now, we are pretty much going with the same routes that we ended with school last year. We are in the process of adding a couple of more routes, and I’ve got a couple of drivers that are gonna be able to take those routes over. So that’s really the major change is just adding a couple of routes in a couple of areas where we are growing in student population.”
Though times have changed, a lot of students are still riding school buses. Chaffin said an estimated 4,300-4,500 students ride the bus. Chaffin said that is about 30-40 percent of the students in the Putnam County School System
“We expect that to grow as the year goes along, and then what we’ll do is we’ll start adjusting then as far as which ones are gonna have the biggest load.”
Chaffin said the electric buses have had some charging issues, but not any maintenance issues. Chaffin said the electric buses are running well overall and that he could see more electric buses coming in to replace diesel buses in the future.
