FTLComm - Tisdale - August 23, 1999

Only a week left for this fleet to be prepared for the coming year. Most city schools are opening their doors this week but Tisdale buses will not be rolling until next week. This one just rolled out of the garage after being washed and those that were getting minor repairs have all rejoined the fleet .

With the consolidation of schools, buses now play a larger role in education then do buildings and teachers. Similarly, transportation costs continue to edge upward so that many people question the concept of transportation of students rather then maintaining smaller schools in outlying areas. Certainly, the cost to the parents are greater as students in outlying areas have less opportunity to participate in extracurricular activities and studies show that the quality of a school's programme can be measured by the quality of its extracurricular programme. With large numbers of students being deprived of this part of schooling it is easy to see how the over all quality of the education programme is greatly degraded by transporting students.