School district making movement in food service and bus shortages

New CBCS kitchen manager

By Kendra Walker

The Crested Butte Community School is poised to have food service help this fall. The Gunnison Watershed School District has hired a kitchen manager for Crested Butte, Kim Kula. Additionally, two food service workers from Gunnison plan to travel to Crested Butte to work in the CBCS kitchen.
“That’s great news,” said superintendent Leslie Nichols. “I think our staff feel a real need for better food service because they notice in their students when lunch is stressful, it comes out in the classroom.”
During the June 13 school board meeting, Nichols shared that the shift does mean the district is now short-staffed for food service in Gunnison. The district is working on outreach to the Spanish-speaking community for recruitment. District-wide, there are four-and-a-half vacant positions out of 17 food service positions.
On the bus front, the district will also have a bus running up to Mt. Crested Butte and Nichols shared that they are working on plans to have at least one bus running in CB South.
However, there is still a lot to figure out because CB South requires two buses to serve that zone. “It’s a little problematic because it would be a new model to try and figure out who gets to get on the bus and how to structure that kind of system,” said Nichols.
“We did have a really steady increase in use of the RTA bus, which doesn’t do a typical school bus route through CB South, it goes to the bus stop in CB South and families adjusted to that,” said Nichols of the collaboration with the RTA this past school year. The RTA added an extra stop at the Center for the Arts so students could get off and safely walk over to the school. “We went from a ridership increase from two to five kids to over 20 consistently by the end of the year which is great.
“We’re trying to strategize how we can add a school bus to that system, to that model, so we’re not running a bus route but we’re just supplementing the RTA’s route. It’s just a conundrum.”
She concluded, “But we’re seeing some movement in the hurt that Crested Butte made it through this year, we’re trying to find some relief.”