School gets off to good start

Transportation issues getting ironed out

Class is back in session across the Gunnison RE1J school district and—a few transportation hiccups aside—things got off to a pretty good start.
In Crested Butte, a shortage of bus drivers left some kids without a ride to school on the first day, Monday, August 27. But 583 kids did make it in, to make this year’s enrollment at the Community School nine students larger than the October count last year.

The new growth caused school officials to open up a third second-grade class to accommodate 74 students, which makes the second grade class the largest in the school this year.
Superintendent Jon Nelson says the district had hoped to clear up the transportation issue by the start of the school year. After budget cuts were discussed last year, the school board settled on a reduction to transportation costs, which was widely seen as the most likely area to see a decrease.
But the plan was still to maintain four routes for the Crested Butte Community School, Nelson says, with local people driving instead of paying bus drivers for their time to drive up from Gunnison. But no one stepped up from the north end of the valley to fill two of the driver positions.
“When we put out the survey in December looking for feedback on budgetary considerations, transportation was the number one item where people thought we could save some money,” Nelson said. “So we placed ads in the newspaper and hung a banner in town and still we have not had any applicants.”
That has left two buses mostly idle, with just one of those being driven part-time by an educational assistant at the school. “We’ve made a conscious decision to keep resources in the classroom,” Nelson says. “That’s why we’ve looked at cuts like this.”
CBCS principal Stephanie Niemi says the transportation situation has affected some of the younger students who have a hard time walking to school from the far corners of town, as well as those in the valley’s outlying subdivisions.
“We’re definitely on it and hopefully we’ll have it figured out by the end of the week.”
Otherwise, Niemi said, things at Crested Butte Community School are going great.