Hello Pine Bush families,

I’m writing to families impacted by a few changes in our bus schedule that will take effect tomorrow, Monday, Sept. 27, 2021.

Five bus routes which transport children to seven different private schools will change from Birnie Bus to Orange County Transit in a 30-day emergency contract. The routes, including pick up and drop off times, will all remain the same. The bus and the driver will be different. The affected routes include buses that transport student to the following schools: Burke, Chapel
Field, Harmony Christian, Most Precious Blood (in Montgomery), Our Lady of Mt Carmel (in Middletown), Over the Moon (in Middletown), and St. John’s.
This emergency contract was executed in order to make more drivers available to Birnie Bus to address their chronic driver shortages. I described our intention to take this path during my overview of the bus situation at our last Board of Education meeting. I will give another transportation update at our next BOE meeting scheduled for this coming Tuesday.

During the next 30 days, the district will go out as required by state regulations with an RFP (request for proposal) process to identify who will have these routes for the remainder of the school year. Orange County Transit and Birnie Bus will both be allowed to bid on keeping these routes for the rest of the year. Other vendors could possibly bid as well. However, since none of the other eight to nine companies we approached were willing to consider an emergency contract, I am predicting that they similarly will not be interested in bidding on these routes long term. Once that bid process concludes, I’ll call back to keep you all in the loop about the outcome.

I recognize that having reliable bus transportation to and from school is part of what allows you to feel confident that your children are being taken care of and comfortable that you will not have to interrupt your schedule in order to make sure your child does not miss school, should a bus not be available to transport her or him. Please know that even if your bus route had not yet been affected by the Birnie Bus driver shortage, you most likely would have been eventually impacted had we not taken the step of executing this contract. That’s because we directed Birnie to rotate the uncovered routes to ensure that the same children were not repeatedly impacted by uncovered routes.

As I said, I’ll be sure to keep you up to date once we know who will be transporting your child for the remainder of the year. Regardless of the provider, the route times should stay as they were when the year began.

Have a great rest of your weekend,

Tim O. Mains, Pine Bush Superintendent