McCall Idaho Headline News

The McCall-Donnelly School District has decided to consolidate or remove a few of its bus routes before the school year begins.

The move was made due to Harlow's Bus Service and Sales inability to hire enough drivers to accommodate the routes for the district. Harlow's Bus Service is the contract bus service for the district.

The Garfield Route is being consolidated with the Eeyore Route, which will add an additional four miles to the Eeyore Route. The Garfield Route was a 27-mile route.

The Tigger and Dumbo Routes were consolidated into one Tigger and Dumbo route. The Tigger Route was about 27 miles and the Dumbo Route was about 24 miles. The combined routes are about 26 miles.

The route consolidations will save the district a total of 48.2 miles a day in transportation costs.

The district will save about $172 a day due to the consolidations for a total of about 530,000 in savings for the year. The district will also not have to pay an additional two bus drivers' surcharge fee of about S5.000 for the year.

The district paid about 5846,000 in transportation costs in the 2006-2007 school year. The Meadows Valley School District paid $105,000 to transport its students to school by bus.

The board of trustees also approved a request to pay $51,031 to Harlow's Bus Service and Sales to be used to offer healthcare benefits to the company's part-time bus drivers year round.

"The bottom line is we have got to because we need drivers," trustee Mary Hart said.

The bus service requested $89,000 from the board to pay its drivers an extra three dollars an hour and benefits, but the trustees did not approve the pay raise.

The healthcare benefits were somewhat offset by the consolidation of bus routes that created a savings to the district of about $35,000.

In 2005, the district approved a $3 an hour raise for bus drivers from $10 an hour to $13 an hour.