I see buses all the time with only a few children on them. What are they doing?
Virginia Beach City Public Schools' buses make two to four runs into and out of schools each day. We currently carry over 68,000 students to school and bring them home daily. On the majority of these runs, VBCPS buses achieve a load factor of more than 75%. However, we have many special programs that require that students be transported considerable distances. When transporting students to these special programs, the time length of the run sometimes makes it impossible to fully utilize the capacity of the bus. Often, however, as the bus travels within the school's attendance boundary it will stop and pick up additional students.
Examples of these special programs would be:
- Magnet schools and gifted and talented programs that encompass multiple base school boundaries and result in light loads due to the number of students involved and the time and mileage to the centralized locations.
- Alternative programs, vocational programs, alternative schools, and other programs with limited enrollment and central location result in light loads.
- Special Education Programs - Special education runs tend to be lightly loaded due to the small number of children assigned to centers and the boundary can be citywide
- Another reason is the school boundaries. Some school boundaries cover wide land areas that extend bus runs in miles and time resulting in less than capacity loads.