NEW SCOTLAND — Like districts everywhere, Voorheesville is facing a problem with staffing shortages when it comes to transporting students to and from school. 

During the Jan. 5 meeting of Voorheesville’s board of education, Superintendent Frank Macri first offered praise for the job the district’s transportation department had done over the past year, but added, “Like many school districts across the region, across the state, across the country, we have struggled with staffing with our bus drivers and getting bus drivers staffing.”

Voorheesville is in a better position than some of its neighboring school districts, Macri said, “but that can change rapidly.”

He said, “We are expecting that this is going to change for us. We have an upcoming retirement. We have staff members that are getting, you know, people can get ill, they can get the flu, they can get sick, things happen. When that happens, we run very thin.”

Macri said the district was “actively looking at 100 different possibilities and ways to do it, “ including possibly contracting out some of the work, which would be “extremely expensive, if we even get bids on those.”

The superintendent continued, “I just kind of want to mention it a little bit, that unfortunately there are possibilities of double-up routes.”

Route doubling in school-bus transportation generally means having one bus and driver cover what would normally be two separate routes, running them back‑to‑back instead of simultaneously. The practice can reduce scheduling flexibility and cause some students to be picked up earlier than normal to allow the bus time to complete its first route before beginning its second.

Macri also said, “There’s possibilities of staggered arrival. You know, like let’s say a route is running late and we have to do it. We might end up staying with, you know, route seven, your child’s going to be picked up between 7:35 and 8:00 instead of 7 and 7:35. Those are possibilities that can come forward.”

The issue is driven in part by the Voorheesville’s legal obligation to bus all district students regardless of end location, meaning in addition to busing students to Voorheesville schools, the district is responsible for busing district residents to the BOCES Career and Technical Education center in Colonie as well as any private schools students may be attending. 

To deal with the out-of-district bus runs, Voorheesville is examining the possibility of “piggybacking and reaching out to other districts to try to combine some of those private routes or other issues that we can,” Colleen DiCaprio, Voorheesville’s director of finance and operations, told board members on Jan. 5. 

Macri then made a plea to the public, explaining, besides needing a Commercial Driver’s License, if someone had experience with large recreational vehicles, they could drive a school bus. “If you’ve driven a camper that’s not a tow-behind — I’m saying just a regular camper — you can drive a school bus,” Macri said, and even if you can’t, the district will teach you.