By STEELE HAUGEN
CENTRAL OREGON DAILY NEWS
The Bend-La Pine School District put protocols in place for students riding school buses.
“Drivers will be sanitizing the bus after each run,” said Kim Crabtree, transportation director for Bend-La Pine Schools. “Each student will have an assigned seat, they will sit in that same seat every day.”
Kids planning on riding the bus are expected to be COVID-19 safe.
“Each student will be asked to wear a mask or come to the bus with a mask,” Crabtree said. “If they don’t have one or forgotten theirs, we have one available for them. All of our drivers will be masked.”
Parents are also being called on to do their part.
“We are asking all families to register so that we can assign seats and we can know who is on the bus,” Crabtree said.
To see pick up location, time and any transfers, you need to log in on e-Link.
A student’s login information is their student ID and password is their birthday.
The district has around 145 bus drivers and has taken steps to ensure safety of the drivers and students on board.
“A vaccine has been offered to all of our special needs drivers and special monitors and substitute drivers that drive for special needs students,” Crabtree added. “The availability for vaccines for our general education drivers, I believe is coming late next week.”
The district also says it is prepared for COVID scenarios.
“If we find out that there is a student that possibly has been exposed, we save our contract tracing logs, we would turn those over to our nursing staff and that would start contacting families and the county gets involved in that.”
A typical school bus holds around 84 kids on average, but because students need to stay socializing distant, buses will now only hold 40 kids registered to ride.
