As the city of Sammamish works to address traffic concerns in the city, some parents are seeking solutions to the traffic and scheduling issues school bus drivers must face to get students to school on time.

Jennifer Kim, a parent of a student at Pine Lake Middle School, attended the Issaquah School Board meeting on Dec. 13 to talk about how the busses to the middle school have been negatively impacted by changes to the district starting times and shared buses between high school and middle school students.

Kim created a change.org petition, which has more than 110 signatures, to ask for the district to provide more busses or create alternate routes that would help alleviate the problems her neighborhood has been facing.

When her son began sixth grade, she discovered that none of the other middle school students in Summer Meadows neighborhood took the bus because it was a joint route for middle and high school students that arrived at 6:40 a.m., too early for Pine Lake’s 7:40 a.m. start time.

After seeing there was a need in the area for a separate bus, former Director of Transportation Gayle Morgan put the middle school students in the Summer Meadows neighborhood on a separate bus that arrived later, meaning the students wouldn’t have to get up so early and parents wouldn’t have to drive their children up to the school.

However, the school start times for the 2017-2018 year were pushed back much later, to 8 a.m. for the high schools and 8:10 a.m. for the middle schools. In addition to the schedule change, all students lost their individual busses and had to ride a crowded joint bus again as it sat in morning commute traffic.

Kim said that now that the busses are stuck in Sammamish traffic, students are arriving at the middle school late for class. Because bus rides take an hour for students to get to and from school, many middle schoolers in the neighborhood have stopped riding the bus and are back to getting rides from their parents, which further adds to the amount of traffic seen in the city each morning.

“So even though they have a 30 minute later start time this year, our kids are having to get to the bus earlier than last year,” Kim said at the school board meeting. “The point of having the bell time changes was so that high school kids could get more sleep, but it’s having the opposite effect for our middle schoolers.”

Kim is also worried that future development and renovation of Issaquah-Pine Lake Road and the adjacent Conner-Jarvis housing development will only negatively impact the traffic for citizens even further.

In addition to Kim, other neighborhood parents Jason Curnow and Meg Sloan also echoed the same concerns to the school board. The parents asked the school board to find a way to get the middle school dedicated bus back to the neighborhood to make sure that students would be able to get to school on time with the new schedule. Curnow said the bus currently passes Pine Lake Middle School to drop off the Skyline students first, before turning around and sitting in traffic to get back to Pine Lake.

After her presentation to the school board, Kim said she received an email from the board thanking her for speaking, but that they couldn’t do anything at the moment and were looking into the state of transportation in the district.

The district’s Executive Director of Communications, L Michelle, said that the longer bus rides in both the morning and afternoon have been due to both traffic in the city of Sammamish as well as a shortage of school bus drivers that also affected several districts around the state.

“The shortage of bus drivers has impacted our ability to add routes, which increases the duration of existing routes and makes timely service more difficult,” she wrote in an email response. “Additional drivers would shorten current lengthy runs, but traffic patterns are beyond our control. The increase in population along with road closures and changes made to city streets has exacerbated the traffic on many routes.”

The Issaquah School District also has three renewal levies that will be on the upcoming February special election ballot, one of which is a school bus levy that will provide the district $2 million in 2019 to purchase 76 replacement busses, not additional vehicles. Michelle said the district is continually re-routing busses based on enrollment, the number of routes and available drivers.

Nancy Cautard, secretary to the director of transportation at the district, said the changes to bus arrival times getting earlier is one of the ways they have tried to mitigate the amount of time stuck in traffic. Safety, she said, is still the district’s highest priority.

“We’ve had to push back our bus schedules even more the other way for them to get through to traffic,” she said. “We are trying to make it so we can get our drivers through town. We try to make it work and have all of our students get to school and home safely. Safety is No. 1.”