The Chelsea Standard
A Heritage Newspaper
Weekly Publication
District green lights seven new buses
By Rita Fischer, Special Writer
PUBLISHED: January 25, 2007
The Chelsea Board of Education approved the purchase of seven new school buses that will offer better front visibility and will include the "No Child Left Behind" safety systems. The board approved the purchase at the Jan. 8 school board meeting.
Advertisement
The new vehicles will cost a total of $530,299 and will replace seven 13-year-old buses. The expense will come out of the 2004 bond money.
"It is important that we buy the buses now while they are less expensive," said School Supt. David Killips. "The older buses will be taken out of service. We want to continue to keep the buses safe for our students."
The buses will be purchased from Capital City Bus Sales and will hit the road at the start of the 2007-2008 school year.
Transportation Supervisor Sam Vogel said the district needs to purchase the buses now to ensure a timely delivery for the beginning of the next school year. Vogel praised the buses for their improved safety features.
"All of the buses front seats have built-in child seats in the front row for use by pre-school and children less than 50 pounds," Vogel said. "The buses also have an alarm system that requires the driver to walk to the back of the bus at the end of the day to ensure that no child is left behind on an empty bus."
An alarm sets off a horn on the bus and flashes the lights if the driver fails to check the bus for children at the end of each day.
The Chelsea School District covers 125 square miles, compared to Dexter's roughly 85 square miles. School officials said that each day at least 15 buses in Chelsea require spending a majority of their time on dirt roads. These dirt roads only increase the wear and tear on buses.
"We are a very big area," Vogel said. "Mason School District (officials) came out to see our transfer process. They have 100 square miles, but they have no dirt roads. We have a high percentage of dirt roads that tear up the buses."
The goal of Chelsea Transportation Department is to not have a bus with more than 10 years of service in the fleet.
Extra undercoating has been ordered to help with the rusting from dirt and salt.
Vogel said that the new buses also will have digital video systems and GPS.
"The old buses have VHS tapes and were only an hour and a half tape," he said. "The bus driver would have to rewind them after an hour and a half. The advantage to the new digital systems is that they last 30 days. If a person calls and has a question we can check the GPS and it will tell us what speed it is traveling."
All buses, including spares, must pass the annual State Police inspection.
"With the demand of shuttling students, field trips and athletic trips, we use our spare buses weekly," Vogel said.
The retired buses are bought by recyclers who want the engines and transmissions. The old buses bring in roughly $2,000 each and that money goes back to the general school fund.
Not all stories are guaranteed to appear
online. The Web edition contains a reasonable
sampling of the print edition stories.
For the most complete news coverage, we invite you to
subscribe
to the print edition of the paper.
Expanded
Web
Coverage
TOP JOBS
