Guide to Appropriate Bus Driver Attire

Please refer to this completely hand-created dress code guide when preparing for work each morning. Keep in mind that attire sporting emblems or advertising for alcoholic beverages, drugs or other controlled substances, sexual innuendo, or other inappropriate message will not be allowed while transporting students or while operating as an agent of our company.

To the public: please let us know if one of our employees arrives at your stop inappropriately attired. We will address the situation immediately and appreciate your assistance.

Safe Driving!

Kari

Bus Seat Damage

Driving my second route for this school year - not a bad record considering how horrible employee attendance has been this year - I was dismayed to see the state of the seats on our school buses.

Why are students making holes in the seat covers?

Why are they making the holes bigger and bigger?

Why are they taking the foam padding out of the seats?

We need a cure for this problem! It's expensive and potentially dangerous. If there's no padding in a seat designed to cushion students in an accident, how can they be cushioned?

I do not believe the damage is done by students with evil intentions. But the students inflicting the damage are clearly not demonstrating respect for the bus either.

I think parents can help us with our bus seat damage problem.

Talk to students about their bus. Remind them that the bus is designed to be a safe environment; it's actually the second safest form of ground transportation (second only to elevators, incidentally). Ask them to respect the bus.

I've heard some interesting parent perspectives when I've sent bills for bus seat damage to students. Keep this one fact in mind: students do not have the right to damage bus seats because transportation in Monticello is funded by tax dollars!

Safe Driving!

Kari

Preliminary Route Schedules Ready

For the last several years, we've been collecting data from parents by sending home a form containing student information and asking parents to return the form. We made the necessary changes to our database and then sent postcards to each family in mid-August at considerable cost. And we've discovered that by the time school starts the information on the postcards is usually obsolete.

Last August we added two additional notifications, one at Open House and another on the first day of school. Why twice? Between Open House and the start of school we entered more than 2,700 changes to our database. Some of those changes were for custody reasons, others for daycare changes, and still others because families moved to new addresses.

We're trying something new this year. The last week of school we will send home next year's preliminary route information with next year's 1-12 students. (Kindergarten students will receive a letter when they get their introductory letters from their teachers.) We hope the new schedule will remind parents to contact us to make changes for the reasons noted in the last paragraph. We also hope to hear from the parents who have students moving to a new school and are now walkers at that school. We think it will be nice for them to get the heads-up about that significant change sooner rather than later, and it's easier for us to manage the phone calls when it's not quite as busy as it gets in August.

Because bus numbers may change (for capacity reasons) and time schedules change (students may be added or deleted or need to be in a different location, etc.), we plan to prepare and disperse actual route information at this year's Open Houses. Students in grades K-5 will find letters in their classrooms. Students in the Middle School will find letters with their Magic Minutes advisors. High School students will be able to check their information in alphabetical lists located in Main Street during Open House.

If we don't solve the problem and need to make significant changes to routes between Open House and the start of school, we will prepare additional letters and get them to teachers to disperse on the first day. We hope our new system precludes the need to send additional letters on the first day.

We do like to receive changes in some sort of written form. To make changes, email us at jami@hoglundtransportation.com, FAX us at 763.295.0055, write us at PO Box 70, Monticello MN 55362-0070, or click the "Contact Us" button on our website at http://www.hoglundtransportation.com/.

Safe Driving!
Kari