Overloaded school buses cause concern

The Evangeline Parish School Board approved a three-year contract with First Student Wednesday night, March 18, but not before one member, Wanda Skinner, voiced her concerns regarding overloaded school buses.
First Student has been serving the parish’s school transportation needs for several years now, but Skinner said she has witnessed and received reports about children in buses, specifically in the Chataignier area, having to stand or sit on the floor, because there are more students than the bus can safely hold. Skinner, talking to Lance Enkey with First Student, said this is not a one time issue, and this overloading of buses has been going on for some time now.
“This is happening repeatedly,” Skinner said. “There are parents going to pick up their children at school because they don’t want them sitting on the floor of the bus.”
Enkey said they recently discovered the overloading issue and are working to fix it, but maintained that Skinner’s claims of severe overloading, in which students are sitting or standing, are not accurate or possible. Though he offered to pull video from the buses to review them if necessary.
Skinner asked that the issue be corrected as soon as possible.
In other business, the board learned from Superintendent Toni Hamlin that only 21 students, less than one percent of the student testing population, in Evangeline Parish have opted out of PARCC testing. While other parish’s may have policies in place that require the taking of the PARCC assessment, she said students in this parish do not face consequences for opting out. However, she did state that although the students won’t face consequences, the school district receives a zero for that student’s test score. Pine Prairie and Chataignier each had one student opt out, while Bayou Chicot had 19.