East Penn Cuts 'Courtesy Busing' Limit in Half

East Penn Board of School Directors on Monday shortened the distance its elementary school students must live from schools to qualify to ride a school bus.

In an 8-0 vote with one abstention, the board changed the district’s practice of providing busing to students who live 1.5 miles and farther from their schools to those who live within .75 of a mile.

The practice of automatically providing busing to students who live within a certain distance of a school is called "courtesy busing."

Currently all Willow Lane students are eligible to be bused. Next school year, 140 of those students who are currently being bused to Willow Lane Elementary School will lose the use of the bus.

But Willow Lane Elementary School students, whose parents are in the midst of an almost yearlong busing vs. walking issue with the administration, are not the only ones affected since the new practice will be applied to elementary schools districtwide. And the new busing practice has no relation to the Willow Lane issue, directors said.

Another 42 students—20 from Alburtis, 12 from Lincoln and 10 from Jefferson elementary schools—will become eligible to be bused to school.

As always, students whose routes to school include roads that are deemed “hazardous”— including busy roads with no sidewalks and railroad tracks that must be crossed—will always be eligible to be bused, as will Special Education students, according to Superintendent Thomas Seidenberger.

Seidenberger also said the district is working on a computer program which, when an address is typed in, will indicate its exact distance from one of the seven East Penn elementary schools.

The VersaTran software will be available on the district website before school starts in August, he said.

“We’re using GPS to make this solid. It hasn’t been done before,” Seidenberger said after the meeting, “We have reinstalled all the data. It takes time but it will be instantaneous when it’s done.”

Yet to be determined is the way distance will be measured—either door-to-door or property-line-to-property-line—but Seidenberger said that if a home-to-school distance is challenged the district will go out and measure it.