Hello Pine Bush families and staff,

I have spent most of today working with the administrative leaders throughout the district to discuss our short-term and long-term potential solutions to the bus situation announced to us late yesterday by our bus company, Birnie Bus.  They just provided me with a list of uncovered runs for tomorrow, Thursday, Sept. 9. With no driver, these routes will not be able to bring kids to school in the morning or take them home in the afternoon. I will provide the list of routes in a moment. First let me tell you how I expect to proceed.

First off, tonight will be the last time a call will be made to announce that some children can be transported to school and some cannot.  I have informed Birnie Bus that I am unwilling to deny some students access to instruction. We are taking this one day at a time so I will call back tomorrow night with an update.  

We do have what we believe is a viable short term solution – one that we could employ for about a month while we get our longer-term solution in place. In order to operationalize that short-term solution, I will need to collaborate with our Pine Bush Teacher’s Association.  Once I have been able to begin those discussions tomorrow, I can share more with you about what that solution might look like.

In the meantime, we have created two new Facebook groups to facilitate parents getting in touch with one another to create carpools or ride shares. Such arrangements would be really helpful to alleviate the heavy traffic at school arrivals and dismissals that have been clogging the roads around our schools. One page is designed for parents on the south end of the district whose children do or did attend school in Circleville and the other page for parents who live in the north end of the district. These sites are not a place to complain; they are a place to connect.  If any of our PTAs have similar efforts underway, I would be happy to share their Facebook sites with parents in that school.

PB Bus Connection/Solutions SOUTH             

PB Bus Connection/Solutions NORTH

I believe these sites will continue to be useful, since bus transportation seems to be challenging across the region..

The routes again are:

• Combo Crispell/ HS Routes: 400, 404
• Pine Bush HS Route: 130, 141, 143
• Circleville MS Route: 654
• Pine Bush Elementary Route: 341
• Pakanasink Routes: 721 and 727V
• Special Ed. Route: Goshen BOCES 6
• Special Ed. Route: Goshen BOCES 7
• Over the Moon Route – Middletown location only

I know this is disruptive and as I said earlier, I will call back tomorrow night with an update.

Thank you,

Tim O. Mains, Pine Bush Superintendent