Overhaul comes in the wake of problems at the beginning of 2017-18 school year

By Sarah Hall

Editor

At the beginning of the school year, many Baldwinsville Central School District families were sent the wrong bus routes for their students. When they tried to get the right information from the district’s Transportation Department, the response was less than stellar.

“What happened this year, parents got the cards the week before school started, the information was wrong, they called Transportation and no one was there and they got no answer,” said David Kilcourse, BCSD’s director of pupil and personnel services. “We can’t have that.”

Those parents that did get through, BCSD Superintendent of Schools Matt McDonald said, were treated badly.

“Frankly, I’m disgusted by the way we’re treating each other and the way we treat customers and the community,” McDonald said while discussing the issue at his latest Coffee and Conversation event, held Thursday, March 15, at the Baldwinsville Public Library. “The rollout with transportation [in the fall] did not go well for many reasons. I’m fixated on the morale and the way we treat people.”

In hopes of changing the way things are done in the Transportation Department, McDonald has assigned Kilcourse to manage the department.

“Dave is my jack of all trades,” McDonald said. “If I have a problem, I put Dave on it.”

Kilcourse, a Baker High School graduate who has been employed by the district for 15 years, said he has already undertaken several steps to avoid a repeat of September’s debacle.

“We’ve gone all electronic [with bus routes],” he said. “We can fix some issues more immediately — we’re not going to have to wait to send out another mailer. We’re moving into the electronic piece of that.”

Going electronic — the routes will be on SchoolTool the same time teacher placement information goes out to parents — will allow the district to get the information out sooner, which will allow mistakes to be fixed sooner. In addition, Kilcourse said he’ll have the office staffed full-time in the last weeks before school starts so that someone can be there to answer questions.

Fixing the customer service and personnel issues in the department will take a little longer.

“We need to treat everyone with respect. Anything less will not be tolerated,” Kilcourse said.

He noted that most of the problems he’s fielding at the moment from community members have concerned rudeness from the staff.

“Right now, the focus is not on ‘I called with a problem and I was told no.’ It’s ‘I called and I was treated disrespectfully,’” he said. “It has little to do with the child. I have to focus on something that, frankly, I think is nonsense.”

Kilcourse said he is working on some new training with the Transportation staff that he hopes will solve the problem. He said he would like to incorporate some of the Positivity Project training being used in the schools, as it’s been successful in solving some of the bullying and character issues there.

“My goal is to do what I do and hope they will understand my expectations are a lot different,” Kilcourse said.

McDonald said he was confident that Kilcourse could solve the problems plaguing the department.

“He doesn’t know the ins and outs of transportation, but he knows people, and he knows the expectations of the board of education and the expectations that I have as superintendent,” he said. “We have our work cut out for us. I’m not a threatening guy, but we have to do what’s right for our district, for our community and for our kids. If that means weeding people out of there, that’s what has to happen, and he’s the man to do it.”

Kilcourse said he is working on some other initiatives for transportation, including putting wifi on some of the longer bus routes and piloting a GPS app that lets families know when their buses will arrive.

“We’re working now with a few families and we’ve gotten good feedback,” he said. “I’d like to get that going and I hope that can be a reality, but I don’t want to promise anything. It’s not 100 percent perfect right now. Right now we can really only track on one device on one bus, so we’re still working on that.”