District transportation staff updated the board on ridership recovery, driver recruitment and an electrification plan for the bus lot.

Key points

- Ridership: Staff reported ridership recovery is roughly 34% on a sampled day compared with a pre-pandemic baseline of around 40–42%. Staff noted that counting methods differ: some students ride infrequently (field trips, sports) and the district's three-times-yearly counts are snapshots, so longer-term usage estimates are higher.
- Driver recruiting and training: The district graduated seven new drivers this year and is conducting interviews for another class. Staff said recruiting higher-quality candidates allowed the transportation department to bring some routes back in-house and reduce expensive contracted services.
- Funding and state formula: Drivers explained how destinations and average trip distance feed the state's transportation allocation formula; more in-house routes and higher ridership increase the district's state allocation.
- Bus electrification plan: Staff described a two-phase plan to power electric buses on the district lot. Phase 1 would bring new power and a level-3 charger to the south end of the lot to serve small buses and visiting buses; estimated Phase 1 design, trenching and transformer work is roughly $400,000 to $500,000. Phase 2 would extend power to the remainder of the bus lot for the larger buses and represents a materially larger project.
- Interim hardware: The district currently charges four electric buses from an existing transformer and had installed two chargers; it has two additional small gasoline buses on order.
- Cost-savings steps: Staff said short-term actions include doing more mechanical repairs in-house, improving ridership (to increase state allocation), and piloting student scanning technology to capture riders on and off buses so the district can bill appropriately and increase revenue capture.

Quotes

"When we are able to recruit more drivers, we're able to take back routes that we would have had to outsource to car services," William, the transportation presenter, said.

"Phase 1 is roughly going to be somewhere in that $400,000 to $500,000 phase to do that work for transformer placement, trenching, design, permitting," he added.

Next steps

Staff will continue recruiting classes, test rider scan technology next year, and continue design work with PSE and an electrical engineer on bus-lot electrification. The board and staff noted that state transportation funding levels are still tied to legislative-level decisions and that improved rider counts would help the district recover more operating dollars.

Ending note

Board members praised the transportation team's recruiting and operational creativity while asking staff to return with refined cost estimates and potential funding sources for the electrification phases.