Education Week - February 6, 2013 - Special Report - S10

LESSON LEARNED

“If you need
help, you need to
call your peers.
People try to
fix problems
themselves, when
there’s probably a
thousand people
who have fixed it
before.”

TRANSPORTATION

Steve A. Simmons III
DIRECTOR OF TRANSPORTATION Columbus Public Schools, Ohio
BY CHRISTINA A. SAMUELS

n 2010, the 51,000-student Columbus, Ohio, school district considered
cutting busing of high school students
as a money-saving measure, just as
most of the other large districts in the
state had done.
But the state’s biggest district managed to come up with a creative solution: Instead of doing away with
busing for older students altogether,
Columbus eliminated most neighborhood bus stops and used neighborhood schools as centralized stops for
older students. The change cut the
number of high school bus stops from
nearly 1,500 to 230 and pared about
$2 million from the district’s $50 mil-

S10 |

lion-a-year transportation budget.
“Doing away with the service is
doing a disservice to our students,”
says Steve A. Simmons III, who came
up with the idea. The director of
transportation for the past six years,
Simmons, 56, has spent 30 years with
the district, where he started as a bus
mechanic and worked his way up.
His longevity gives him a certain
amount of leeway with the school
board, he says—though he jokes that
he is a “loudmouth.”
“I’m very vocal,” he says, “because
I’ve come up through the system.”
John Stanford, the deputy superintendent in charge of operations,

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lauds Simmons’ creativity in managing district money. “He’s constantly
reviewing the industry for best-practice ideas and consulting with his colleagues,” Stanford says.
Getting students to school is a distinct challenge in Ohio’s capital city.
The district has no set feeder patterns, because students can enroll in
any school that has space for them
as part of an intradistrict-choice
program. State law requires the district to provide bus transportation to
charter and private school students
in kindergarten through 8th grade
who live within district boundaries
but more than two miles from their

schools of choice. That means some of
the bus routes serve schools outside
the city.
Transporting more than 30,000 students daily, the school district maintains 750 routes and can end up making more than 200 modifications a
day, as students enter, leave, or move
within the district, Simmons says.

Keeping Track
Columbus has implemented some
innovative programs under Simmons’
watch: For example, a global-positioning tracking system, installed in January 2008, allows the district to monitor every vehicle in its fleet. Zonar
Systems, the Seattle-based provider
of the technology, says the system offers benefits such as a wireless device
that drivers can use for their pre- and
post-trip inspection reports and a
monitoring system school principals
can use to track bus arrivals. The
district was an early adopter of the
technology, Simmons says.
This school year, the district has expanded its technology use through a
student tracking tag that goes on students’ backpacks. The credit-card-size
tag, called ZPass, is read by a device
inside the bus and can keep track of
when students board and exit.
Using the device, “we’ll be able to
look up and see that little Stevie’s on

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Education Week - February 6, 2013 - Special Report

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