Back to School: Increase in enrollment at local school district prompts changes to bus routes

MIAMISBURG — Miamisburg City Schools are seeing higher student enrollment with the addition of about a hundred new homes in the area.

With kids heading back to class next week, News Center 7′s Taylor Robertson went to the school board to check on its plan to get kids to school.

“We’ve heard some new housing developments that began about 12-18 months ago. So one our housing developments has 100 that have been built,” Laura Blessing, superintendent for the district said.

It’s one of two reasons the Miamisburg School District is changing its bus routes.

Blessing has been superintendent of the district for four years and has seen the routes change.

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“That 2020 school year and then for those couple first two years, it was focusing on how to handle COVID how to take care of the learning loss that our students had encountered, and just a new way of thinking about school as we moved out of COVID,” she said.

But in those two years, the district started testing the idea of a full-day kindergarten program.

But now, parents say they want this to be permanent.

“Right now we have over 70 percent of our families that want full-day kindergarten versus half-day,” Blessing said.

Since most parents signed up for this program, the district made changes to their busing systems.

“We’ve had to kind of expand our routes and so we might have two schools riding the same bus for full-day kindergarten and then we’ve reduced half-day sections,” she said.

The first day of school is a week away.

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“We have students enrolling at the same time we have students withdrawing, so it’ll be really hard to kind of determine the total data of enrollments,” Blessing said.

She said something they look at ahead of the first day of school every year.

“If the middle school had a large amount of students in one neighborhood and then the next year they didn’t, we would have to kind of merge two routes that maybe had been the same for multiple years to accommodate the changes where our students live,” she said.

Blessing said parents can check on any busing changes on the school’s website in the transportation portal, but the school will reach out to the families that are affected by changes.

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