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Schools

District 197 to Cut Morning Bus Service to Private Schools

With conflicting start times, Convent of the Visitation and Trinity Lone Oak Lutheran School students are among those no longer be served by morning bus routes.

District 197 will no longer provide morning bus service for students at Convent of the Visitation School, St. Thomas Academy and two other private schools this fall, but few students will be affected, an STA school official said.

District 197 previously provided morning bus service to students attending St. Thomas Academy and Visitation in Mendota Heights, as well as St. Croix Lutheran in West St. Paul and Trinity Lone Oak Lutheran School in Eagan.

The school district is making the transportation change both for budgetary reasons and because the private school morning start times didn’t line up with the ISD 197 schools starting times, said Mark Fortman, chief operations officer of ISD 197.

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About 15 students will be affected, Fortman estimated.

“In an era of ever shrinking budgets, we needed to make a change,” Fortman said.

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The district will continue to provide afternoon bus service to the four private schools.

While many St. Thomas Academy and Visitation students are driven to the schools by their parents, the schools also operate a cooperative bus transportation system to parts of the metro area. That service could possibly be expanded to cover the students dropped by ISD 197, said Robley Evans, director of Business Affairs, St. Thomas Academy.

“We have about 92 to 100 students outside the school district that we have buses go out and get them and bring them to Visitation and STA,” Evans said. “We rent outside bus services for those students who are coming from six different parts of the Twin Cities."

Evans agreed that few STA students will be affected by the 197 transportation change. He had heard of no STA or Visitation families who would be switching schools because of the bus change.

“Just morning service is not going to affect us too much,” Evans said. “It might affect Visitation more with their grade school.”

In addition to looking at expanding the contracted bus service, Evans said the private schools could try and connect area parents into car pools.

District 197 will save an estimated $30,000 with the transportation change, Fortman estimated.

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