Great Barrington — After putting out a request for proposals, the Eight Town Regional School District Planning Board has hired a transportation consultant.
The board is researching and working on the potential merger of Berkshire Hills and Southern Berkshire regional school districts.
At a previous meeting on June 30, Project Manager Jake Eberwein said that the committee is working on a study on potential transportation costs and bus ride times for students.
At the meeting, Eberwein said that the board’s initial analysis found that transportation costs would not increase and that some students would have either shorter or longer ride times based on geography.
At the board’s Operations Subcommittee virtual meeting on July 14, Eberwein said that the board has hired consultant Rich Labrie to put together a transportation report.
“The RFP was really an attempt to go deeper on the transportation work that we had done in the initial phase, and look specifically at the needs of the children in our district,” Eberwein said.
An initial transportation analysis study was completed by Eberwein in early January.
Labrie is the former collaborative director for the Lower Pioneer Valley Collaborative, which is made up of seven school districts outside of Springfield.
“While I was there, we developed our self-operated transportation system for seven of our school districts,” Labrie said. “When I retired about 12 years ago [the collaborative was] running about 270 buses and vans, doing everything in regards to transportation.”
Labrie said that the committee is in the process of gathering student information data to complete the report.
“Once that is done, we’ve already collected a lot of the data that we need to build our [report] templates,” Labrie added. “The templates basically will start to look at the configuration of the district’s vehicles. We can make a cost comparison between the current cost and future costs of transportation.”
Labrie said that bell schedules from all schools will also be compiled into the report.
“One of the things that will need to happen is with Southern Berkshire, there’s going to need to be a change in bell times as you look at bringing all of the high school students to the central location at Monument Mountain,” Labrie said. “Once we develop the routes, we’ll know what the optimum bell schedule should be, to make all of that happen. In the meantime, we’ve collected all of this information from each school district.
Labrie said that another part of his report would be to examine the possibility of the combined school district operating its own transportation program, as opposed to contracting bus services out to companies.
“We just completed the design and a cost estimate for a centralized transportation facility, which would be located presumably in Great Barrington,” Labrie said. “One of the issues we had compiling this information is that the Berkshire Hills district uses PowerSchool for their student management information system, and the Southern Berkshires district uses Rediker. We have to rely on technology to meld those two together.”
Through the combined data, Labrie said that the committee would be able to determine the size of buses and the number of buses needed to make the potential school bus routes available.
Labrie said that the report would be completed during the first week of August and a formal presentation would be given to the committee during one of its meetings.
See a recording of the board’s Operations Subcommittee July 14 virtual meeting below, courtesy of Managing Editor Shaw Israel Izikson.
