From the perspective of a man who oversees getting more than a thousand students to school on time even in bad weather and when drivers call out sick – shifting the location of the middle school from Rundlett to a new school about six miles away should have a “negligible” effect on busing students around the city.

But that’s not to say it wouldn’t cause changes, said Terry Crotty, Concord School District’s transportation director. 

Crotty estimated recently that moving the school could add 100 to 150 pupils to the roster of more than 2,000 students eligible for bus rides. That increase is partly because the district doesn’t ask students to cross the overpass bridge above I-393 at Exit 2 even if they live close enough to walk to school at the Broken Ground site, which increases the number of homes eligible to ride the bus.

In Concord, middle schoolers who live up to 1 ½ “road miles” from their school – the distance walking along a street, not the distance as a crow flies – generally are not picked up by a bus. The limit is one mile for elementary school and two miles for high school. State law sets two miles as the maximum and allows districts to require students to walk as far as one mile to get to a bus stop.

Crotty said in a recent interview that this estimated increase in pupils if the middle school moves might mean more buses – carrying 40-50 kids each would be needed but because resources can be shifted around, most costs will likely balance out.

“It’s complicated,” he said. “We wouldn’t do this in a silo – we would have to look at all the needs.”

The change in school geography and location of riders might add a small number of extra route segments, the term used by the department, to the current number of 85. However, Crotty said, additional segments should reduce the miles traveled by the other segments. 

In 2011, the school district closed five elementary schools, including Dame and Eastman near Broken Ground, and consolidated them into three. Crotty noted that although the number of bus routes increased when that happened, the budget “remained stable as a result of the school location changes.”

Among the variables, for example, is how many eligible pupils would actually take the bus rather than be driven to school by their family. Nobody knows if that percentage would be higher or lower than at Rundlett, making it difficult to judge the traffic effect on local streets.

“We’ve got 13 buses (going to) Broken Ground already” for the elementary school, Crotty noted. Middle school buses and students driven by family would arrive later because of different start times for the grade levels. “We know how to get buses in and out of there, we know how to queue up.”

In Concord, as in most school districts, a smaller percentage of eligible students are riding the bus than before the COVID pandemic, which has contributed to traffic backups around schools in the morning and afternoon. That helps explain why prior to COVID, the Concord School District had 22 ½ routes for the “big buses,” the full-sized school bus, but has just 19 routes now.

Because of this reduction, some routes are longer than they used to be. The longest current route, which goes along Mountain Road, is scheduled to take 81 minutes if all goes well.

Students walking to and from Broken Ground may have to traverse several streets that lack sidewalks, with at least two crosswalks painted on roads that have no sidewalks, as City Councilor Stacey Brown noted in a blog post titled “Where the Sidewalk Ends.”

The city does not consider whether sidewalks exist on a street when calculating “road miles” that a student can walk, Crotty said.

Concord’s school transportation department, located in the back of the city’s Operations and Maintenance Facility on North State Street, has 27 vehicles from vans up to Type D buses, those with flat fronts, that can hold up to 90 students.  In the last school year it totaled 458,845 miles of trips, equivalent to the distance to the moon and back, with about 1,950 eligible riders at almost 1,500 bus stops on 85 different “run segments.”

That includes 1,008 field trips, an average of 1.5 vocational education shuttles per day, and about 200 special needs riders carried in 12 special buses and vans.

“The district is in the process of reinvesting in transportation by catching up deficit areas. Investments include purchasing new buses, negotiating a competitive salary for drivers and monitors to increase recruitment and retention, and correcting substandard facility conditions,” Crotty said. “Small changes in ridership should be easily absorbed in the new model.”

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