On October 6, the Harrison County Board of Education held its first regular meeting of the month. About 15 minutes was spent on a financial report from new Superintendent Dr. Sheena Van Meter, covered elsewhere in this edition.
First came student and staff recognition. The Board honored Bridgeport High School for earning a Future Farmers of America state championship in veterinary science. Students have to identify and explain information such as medical equipment and various parasites that can afflict animals.
The Board then read and approved a proclamation celebrating school service personnel. School Board President Frank Devono Jr. stated that “I just wanna say thank you for everything that you do. Most of the kids in the county, they’re the first people they see in the morning, the last people they see in the night. And you guys do such a great job.”
Rosie Linton, parent of a fifth grade student at Mountaineer Elementary School, came to speak during public comment. School and Board officials are not permitted under law to interact during public comment. This is to protect the public’s right to speak from aggressive behavior from government officials, not to prevent the public from getting answers on the spot.
She shared her frustration with “the management of the transportation program here in this county.” Linton took care to state that her problem was not with bus drivers or other individual employees.
“In the past two weeks, so the last ten days of school,” Linton explained, “Mountaineer Elementary has had a bus issue five of those days. So whether a bus did not run at all during the day or it was able to run in the morning and did not run in the afternoon.”
“Mountaineer that was formerly Northview, you know, we were consolidated last year out of our community where 90 percent of our children did walk to school,” said Linton. She then added that students who walked to the school closed last year now have to rely on bus transportation as “their only way to reach school.”
“And, really, the issue is that, you know, our community is a community of underprivileged children,” said Linton, who went on to say “a lot of our community members don’t have private transportation.”
She shared a series of miscommunications leaving parents wondering if there was a way on certain days to get children to and from the school. Linton pointed out that low income neighborhoods have high populations of children at-risk and that many of those kids see school as “their safe space” and even the only place in their life to get nutritious food.
“What I’m asking this board to do is attempt to meet those needs of, you know, our communities that really need that the most,” said Linton.
Prior to the beginning of the school year, the Harrison County Board of Education had heard from Jamie Kosik about a shortage of bus drivers for the 2026-27 school year. He reported on Oct 6, that they have made progress in expanding the number of available drivers.
“Right now, I’ve got one, two, three, five people that are really close to being behind the wheel. One happens to be one of our mechanics,” Kosik reported. The mechanic is training to be a substitute driver so he can “jump in” when needed.
Kosik then explained the barriers to progress in hiring a bus driver for the school system. We have to get all the state approvals, background checks, fingerprints, all that stuff before we can really do anything” to train.
After approval “it requires 30 hours of computer aided training that we have to have a trainer there with them to answer questions that they might have as they go through each one of these videos in these computer aided trainings. After that, there’s a lot to do with pre trip, post trip. We got to get them behind a wheel” but “We’ve gotta make sure that they’re safe before we can let them finish taking their CDL, and then we have to get a state examiner to examine them on a final run before we can put them behind the wheel.”
Kosik shared that from the day of application to putting a successful candidate on the road takes between 8 and 10 weeks.
Dr Van Meter responded that “it’s important too that we reach out and and we’ll do that to the Department of Ed and the Transportation Department there and just explain to them these are some specific roadblocks that we’ve hit . . . that seem like they could probably be worked around if we could just get some maybe policy changes at that level.”