By: Dan Sokil

Although teachers in the Souderton Area School District are on strike, many school buses are still on the road.

"We're running about half of the buses that we would normally run. Pretty much the only thing that isn't running is the buses for the 10 public schools," said Steven Pollack, the district office's supervisor of planning and operations.

"What's active right now is we're running the buses for all of the non-public school transportation, as well as for all of the special ed transportation for students that are assigned to programs outside of our public schools," Pollack said.

Some buses deliver district students to just public schools, some to just non-public, and some do both, depending on calculations of route efficiency, and those routes are what determines who is currently working.

"In fact, we have 22 buses that are in that situation: they do combined runs, but are only doing part of their run right now. They're doing the non-public part now but are not able to do the other part of it because those schools are affected by the strike," Pollack said.

The district contracts with Transportation Services Inc., a branch of Franconia-based Hagey Coach & Tours for their school bus needs, and all of those drivers will do 180 days of driving, just not all at the same time.

"We run an integrated schedule, where we do the most efficient runs from a time distribution

standpoint, and mix them together where we can for efficiency purposes. Unfortunately in this circumstance, it ends up being less efficient because the buses for non-public routes are running now and not the public ones," Pollack said.

"Close to half of the drivers are basically not working at this point, because they don't have a run to do, but they'll make up their days just like the instructors have to make them up. Ultimately they'll get their 180 days in, they'll just go longer into June," he said.

Representatives of Hagey, whose headquarters is located on Lower Road in Franconia, declined to comment for this story.

"There will be some additional cost; the effect in terms of the whole year is that those buses would have to run on more days. It's 180 for each, but normally they overlap," said Pollack.

"Say the strike ended today, and it was 10 days long. That would be 10 more days that the public buses would run when the non-public ones wouldn't, so there'll be some additional cost for driver time, and some additional fuel costs as well because it'll end up working out less efficiently," he said.

The combined additional fuel and driver costs he estimated at about $2,000 a day, out of the more than $6.7 million budgeted for the district's transportation needs for 2008-09.

"We did get some questions at the very beginning of the year, mainly from parents of non-public students who wanted to know if they were affected, and the basic answer is no, they won't be," said Pollack.

But much like the district's public school teaching aides, and anyone else who works the same schedule as the district's students, some drivers can only wait for the strike to end.

"The same thing in general would be true of people like our food service workers too, who again will ultimately make up those days, but at least for now they're out of work," Pollack said.