The 28th FCS Cares, TIC Shout-Out goes to the hard working staff in the Transportation Department!
The Transportation Department staff members are the first to greet our students and families in the morning and the last to wish them well in the afternoon. They are among the few educators in the district who visit our students’ homes daily and are often witness to the challenging situations some of our students face in their personal lives. This TIC shout out is for our entire Transportation Department for the care with which they do their jobs each day.
The bus drivers can often be heard radioing dispatch to request a counselor meet the bus upon arrival at school because of a student’s emotional state or personal situation.
They understand the importance of earbuds and phones to our teenagers. At the end of a route, drivers have called home to let the student know they found those important items on the bus.
They wait until our little ones are safely in their houses before moving on, and when the door is not open, the drivers stay put and work with dispatch to contact parents.
Drivers radio to let schools know they are going to be late so the “kids don’t get in trouble” (quote from a recent communication between a driver and dispatch).
Dispatch continuously communicates with our parents on the phone during routes and relays special circumstances and with our drivers.
When drivers take field trips and are not on their regular routes, they are often heard on dispatch communicating the special needs, considerations and circumstances of “their” students to the sub drivers
All of this is done with a special sense of humor and comradery that few others in the district are able to witness. For example, when a driver radioed to everyone “Dear Lord….Santa is following the school bus on a motorcycle and the kids are going crazy” or when dispatch called to a bus because a boy was worried that he lost his Michigan hat and the driver radioed back assurance that the hat was found but to please let the boy know that the hat “magically turned into an Ohio State hat.”
None of the work the rest of us do as educators could happen if our transportation colleagues were not getting our students to us safely. They work to create a caring and safe environment for our students while transporting them to and from school. FCS should be very proud of our unsung heroes in the Transportation Department.