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I knew it - East Jessamine always were Colts at heart!...read more...

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Finally someone else running against her! Joseph Hagen, you have my vote and my support for your cam...read more...

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The August traffic forecast is out, and it calls for heavy congestion on Wilmore Road.

The fall opening of the new Jessamine Early Learning Village on the site of the old East Jessamine Middle School is expected to boost school traffic flow on Ky. 29 to unprecedented levels.

The Royse Administration Building, Jessamine Career and Technical Center and Hattie C. Warner Elementary School all sit on the same property as the new JELV, and traffic from all the buildings will have just three entrances and exit points along a 1,000-foot stretch of Wilmore Road.

Monday night, the Jessamine County Board of Education heard options to deal with two major transportation issues surrounding the opening of the new school: busing students and traffic flow.

Combination bus system

JELV plans on expanding its kindergarten to a full-day program in the fall. Under a full-day schedule, every bused kindergarten student in the county would have to be transported in the morning and in the afternoon — a stark difference from this year’s half-day system that diffuses some bus traffic to the middle of the day.

Currently, all bus-riding preschool and kindergarten children ride dedicated buses — buses without elementary, middle or high school students. But continuing to use a dedicated-bus system with full-day kindergarten would require the purchase of five new buses and increase annual costs by more than $250,000, according to Deputy Superintendent Owens Saylor.

“We’re looking at covering the entire county twice per day instead of half in the morning and half in the afternoon,” Saylor said. “What impact does that have? We found that it certainly was going to be a major cost increase.”

In place of the dedicated-bus system, the district proposed to the board that it use a combination bus system that involves some kindergarten students riding transfer buses. This system would use one extra bus the district already owns, and the expenses associated with it would increase annual costs by almost $60,000.

“I can’t tell you tonight that it’s going to cost us less money to implement the recommendation we’ve put forth,” Saylor said. “But it’s going to cost us a lot less money than the full, dedicated system would cost to replicate what’s there now.”

In the combination system, a vast majority of kindergarten students would ride a bus with elementary students once a day, in either the morning or the afternoon.

“If they live in the Warner district, they’ll ride a bus to Warner in the morning,” Saylor said. “But only once per day — if they ride to the elementary school on a combined bus in the morning, in the afternoon they’ll get on a dedicated bus at the Village and go straight home from there. Only once per day would they be on with elementary students.”

Once combination-bus kindergarten students arrive at elementary schools in the morning, they would switch to transfer buses that would take them to JELV. Other students would ride transfer buses to elementary schools in the afternoon and then ride home with elementary students. When getting on and off transfer buses, kindergarten students would be under direct physical supervision by bus drivers and a school “transfer monitor.”

Despite the potential savings, board member JoAnn Rohrback expressed regret that the district had to consider the transfer option.

“It’s unfortunate that we have to transfer at all,” she said. “It’s just an added step for the children and the parents’ worries.”

Preschoolers have a different set of legal requirements than kindergarteners, and they would continue to ride dedicated buses. Wilmore students would also continue to ride dedicated buses to JELV because of travel-time constraints.

Traffic flow

Under the combination bus system with transfer buses, roughly 24 buses would have to line up in JELV’s bus lane; without transfer buses, the lane would have had to hold close to 40 buses, Saylor said, which would not be feasible.

Apart from the bus traffic, the district has to consider parking for staff at each building on the property, parking for parents who walk their children to class and traffic flow for parents who are dropping their children off at the curb.

The biggest concern discussed Monday was the west intersection with Wilmore Road where traffic from JELV, JCTC and the Royse Administration Building would converge. Superintendent Lu Young said the district had requested that a turn lane be added to Ky. 29 for the intersection but that it wouldn’t be finished for at least a year.

The district is still examining possibilities of how to route traffic during congested periods, and no choice yet is attractive; Saylor called one option “the best of some not-so-good decisions.”

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