HOWLAND — The district’s need for bus drivers has shifted since the beginning of the school year.

As part of his report at Monday’s Howland Board of Education meeting, Superintendent Kevin Spicher said school officials are “very excited” about the direction the district is headed with its transportation and the supervisor overseeing it.

Spicher was referring to Charles Mendenhall, for whom the board approved a pair of supervisory contracts for — one effective May 1, 2026, to June 30, 2026, the other July 1, 2026, to June 30, 2027.

Spicher said it’s taken a bit of time for families to get accustomed to bus stops, which he noted officials fully understand.

“What is important is that they are something that, if you would try and go to a neighboring school district because you don’t like the bus stops, you’re gonna find bus stops — they’re just there,” Spicher said.

Spicher said they’ve worked hard to ensure the stops are in safe places, noting they’ve had success with them overall and that people have been very understanding.

Spicher said he and Mendenhall planned to have numbers for the board at Monday’s meeting, but the district is saving an “inordinate amount” of miles on its buses — which translates to a similar amount of savings on maintenance.

“Tires, brakes, exhausts, engines — all those things that have been saved by other school districts for quite some time,” Spicher said. “We’re excited to see what those savings actually are when it comes down to it, but it’s often going from maybe 40 to 45 stops to five to eight stops.”

Spicher said reducing routes by too much results in a need to increase speed, as the district still has the same amount of surface area to cover.

“The logistics just don’t work,” Spicher said.

He said the district has a new school bus routing software in place, Transfinder, which replaces Versatrans.

Spicher said Transfinder comes with an app for parents that allows them to receive updates about their child’s bus location and set varying notifications about its distance from them.

The software does not track the bus’s live location or speed, according to Spicher, who said the district still tracks both things to ensure drivers aren’t deviating from a route without permission.

Spicher said parents still track the buses because of an app called “Life360,” which parents keep on their children’s phones.

“They’ll let us know if they feel that a bus has been maybe a little bit over speed, and we still have the appropriate conversations just to make sure we’ve talked to the bus drivers,” Spicher said. “We haven’t seen anything way out of line, so no harm yet — we’re doing okay, as far as that goes, and we feel we have a great group of bus drivers right now.”

Spicher said the bus routes are all computerized and it utilizes the parameters school officials put into Google Maps, but it doesn’t always do a great job.

“We’ll move it (the bus stop) farther back from the corner that we know is a very busy intersection because we don’t need to be that close, so we’ll go back 50 feet off of that,” Spicher said, as an example.

He said the district will hire bus drivers if needed, but as of now, they aren’t needed because of substitute bus drivers and the routes they have in place.

“If we’re going to hire, we’re hiring subs because the subs need to be there for any single particular day of the week, if we have someone that’s out,” Spicher said.

He said officials plan to continue speaking with Mendenhall and Transfinder to improve the parameters they have in place, intending to lessen bus stops and improve efficiency, albeit “incredibly costly.”