School district and bus drivers making progress in talks – WBRZ

BATON ROUGE - School was closed Monday to allow bus drivers to talk with school leaders, and it appears those talks went well as the majority of drivers returned to work Tuesday morning.

"Today was a pretty good day. We had about 324 bus operators that came in today most of all of our routes were covered. We had about eight routes that we had challenges with," said Superintendent Sito Narcisse, who spoke to the Volunteers In Public Schools at a luncheon Tuesday.

"We've been working diligently for the last couple days--morning and night--coming up with some formula around logistics to be able to cover and pick up all the kids. We feel like we are getting much, much closer now, so on Thursday we are going to present that to the board and public and then go through that process"

Narcisse and board members will meet with bus drivers and other school system staff Thursday to further discuss logistics. Currently, high school and middle schools are dismissing early.

"We're making some modifications because of the amount of bus drivers. We still have 161 vacancies so we're going to have to make some shifts in school start times."

He says that will involve changing or condensing some routes as well as adjusting school start times. There was no word on if drivers will be paid more on top of their stipend from last week.

The meeting will be Thursday at 5 p.m. at the Professional Development Center.

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School district and bus drivers making progress in talks - WBRZ