PW-S busing plan isn’t running late this year

The Port Washington-Saukville School District was to roll out its 2026-27 transportation guidelines this week, months ahead of the eleventh-hour busing changes it made for this school year that angry parents said were confusing and poorly communicated and left them wondering how their children would get to school.

“The district did make commitments back in September of 2025, and those commitments centered around having earlier communication, earlier registration, clear eligibility guidelines and consistent deadlines that we would meet,” Director of Business Services and Human Resources Mel Nettesheim told the School Board, which approved the plan last week. “We’re looking to fulfill the commitments we made to the community. We recognize we had some improvement to make when it came to communication. We own that.”

Key to the district’s new transportation system is an updated website that includes clear criteria for free busing as well as hazard areas.

The district has also integrated its Infinite Campus software, which parents use for everything from paying school fees to checking their children’s grades, with software used by Johnson School Bus Service, the company that provides bus transportation for the district, for the purposes of registering for transportation and creating efficient school bus routes.

Under the new transportation guidelines, the district will provide more free busing than it is obligated to by state law, which requires public school districts to provide transportation at their cost to students who live more than two miles from the schools they attend.

Next school year, students in 4-year-old kindergarten through fourth grade who live more than one mile from school will qualify for free busing. Students in fifth through 12th grade will have to live more than two miles from school to receive free transportation.

That policy is consistent with those of other area school districts, but it will come at a higher cost because the district receives state transportation aid only for busing those students who live more than two miles from school.

“This is kind of a meet in the middle,” Nettesheim said. “We won’t receive transportation aid for those students who live less than two miles (from school) but we believe it’s safer for our students and safer for our families to provide that transportation.”

State law also requires public school districts to provide transportation for students who live less than two miles from school but would have to walk though a hazard zone— for instance areas that don’t have sidewalks or include a potentially dangerous geological feature such as a river.

Last year, parents complained that the district’s hazard zones were poorly defined and the district transportation plan put the onus on them to identify areas that were safe for their children to walk through. Since then, Nettesheim said, the district’s Safety Committee has studied, clearly defined and approved hazard zones so there will be few if any questions about who qualifies for busing.

The 2026-27 guidelines, however, do away with some services, including the so-called city bus that allows parents of children who don’t qualify for free busing because of their proximity to school to pay for transportation, a reflection, Nettesheim said, of a school bus driver shortage and an effort to make routes as efficient as possible.

“We’re struggling to get bus drivers,” she said. “If we overcommit the transportation we provide, it is going to lead to further upset parents because we may or may not be able to cover all those routes.

“Some kids spend up to an hour or more on the bus, and pick-ups and drop-offs can get late because of multiple stops.”

Supt. Michael McMahon said the city bus routes extended ride time by 10 to 15 minutes and resulted in some middle and high school students being picked up at 6:30 a.m. or earlier, more than an hour before classes begin.

“Eliminating the city bus option helps ensure more efficient routing and reasonable ride times for students who qualify for transportation under district and state guidelines,” he said.

Also eliminated from the transportation service next school year will be the option of having children dropped off at child-care facilities or any location other than their homes.

“In the past we may have picked up somebody at their home and may have dropped them off at someone else’s home or at a child-care facility. That’s no longer allowed,” Nettesheim said. “It gets very difficult for the bus company to keep track if students are getting dropped off at multiple locations.”

At the same time, the district plans to expand and decrease the cost of its before and after-school child care offered at elementary schools.

The exception to the drop-off change is that midday transportation to and from child-care centers will still be offered for 4-year-old kindergarten students, for whom district child care is not yet available.

The changes for next school year come after an overhaul of the busing system last year that caught parents by surprise but was needed, administrators said, to rein in a system that had strayed from district policy, was difficult to navigate, used antiquated technology and did not treat all families the same. McMahon said at the time that since the pandemic, almost every child who registered for busing received it at no cost to their families regardless of where they lived, even it was only a block or two from school.

School Board President Sara McCutcheon said last week she is pleased the district will now have a functional, easy to use and fiscally responsible transportation system.

“I think the more we dug into it, the more we realized just how chaotic and not up to date it was,” she said. “It certainly wasn’t user friendly for our parents and it wasn’t very fiscally responsible.

“This has been a long time in coming.”