Did you know that school buses are the safest form of transportation?

The National Highway Safety Administration states: "The Record is impressive: American students are nearly eight times safer riding in a school bus than with their own parents and guardians in cars." Yearly, 450,000 school buses travel more than 4.3 billion miles to transport 23.5 million children. In Oregon City, our awesome school bus drivers safely travel 5,218 miles transporting 4,245 children to and from school daily. These students ride 40 regular education routes and 20 special needs routes. Last year in addition to home to school operations, the transportation department covered 851 field trips. So far this school year our department has covered 257 field trips. To ensure consistency Oregon City's Transportation Department is transitioning from using bus numbers to route numbers. A place card at the entrance door of each bus identifies the route the bus will be traveling. Buses used on routes will change from time to time but route numbers will stay the same. The installation of VersaTrans (our new routing system) is complete; however, transportation's routing specialist continues the hard work of fine-tuning the data. The program is being used for schedule change and route realignment studies.