The Culver School Board Monday learned about the process of getting students to and from school. Transportation Director Paul Widman detailed the different school bus routes, using the corporation’s route mapping software.
Colored lines representing each of the bus routes zigzagged across the map, connecting dots representing the homes of students. “Nobody overlaps, except on 17, when they’re coming in,” Widman explained. “Everybody’s got their own area.”
Out-of-district enrollment has had an impact on Culver’s bus routes. Widman pointed out that some routes now extend toward the Knox area, while the southwestern portion of the Culver school district appears to have lost students to Eastern Pulaski. “Lawton, this area in here, we used to have a lot of kids in here, VanMeter Park,” Widman said. “We don’t have anybody there anymore.” He noted that Knox and Eastern Pulaski are both picking up students in Ora.
At the same time, Widman pointed out several dots scattered around the map representing out-of-district students attending Culver but beyond the reach of its bus routes. They’re as far away as Knox, Winamac, Medaryville, Rochester, Kewanna, and the South Bend area.
Since many Culver school buses don’t have GPS yet, substitute drivers have to use route sheets with addresses to learn the routes. But Widman said the system is better than it used to be. “When I started, all I had was two or three names and no addresses. They’d just tell you out there where to go, but the first two didn’t get on. You just drove until you found somebody, which wasn’t good at times,” he joked.
Widman said he would eventually like to be able to give drivers turn-by-turn directions using GPS technology in the future.
