The Pottsgrove School District released 2012-2013 teacher assignments and bus schedules to its attending families Saturday.
Bus schedules for all five Pottsgrove school buildings were among information published Saturday by the district
Editor’s note: This story was revised at 9:50 a.m. to correct erroneous information regarding the availability of bus route schedules.
POTTSTOWN PA – With the official start of school now 21 days away, information about teacher assignments and bus schedules was released Saturday (Aug. 4, 2012) by the Pottsgrove School District in mailings to students’ homes. In addition, parents have begun comparing notes and comments about their children’s instructors on three new Facebook pages.
The doors of Pottsgrove’s five buildings – Lower, West and Ringing Rocks elementary schools, Pottsgrove Middle School, and Pottsgrove High – will open Aug. 27 (Monday) at around 7 a.m. to begin welcoming students back after summer vacation.
They’ll also introduce hundreds of young students to classroom environments significantly changed during the past few months by a district-wide restructuring program.
Each of the elementaries formerly catered to pupils in kindergarten through fifth grades who lived in specific geographic areas. They have since been reorganized into educational centers that transform West and Ringing into locations for grades K-2 only, and Lower for grades 3-5 only. For some, that means exploring new classrooms and encountering unfamiliar faces.
It also means bus transportation to those buildings will change. Anxious parents – some of whom have complained the redistricting changes could keep their children in transit too long – announced plans to time bus routes with stopwatches.
What bus routes will students travel? What stops will buses make? Check your child’s mailing
Transportation under Pottsgrove’s redistricting plan has been among its most hotly contested components. Opposing parents claim the district’s current fleet of buses and drivers could not effectively reduce the amount of time their children spend on buses getting to and from the educational centers, and that adding buses would be both necessary and costly.
As of 6 a.m. today (Monday, Aug. 6), the district’s transportation page reported that “2012-2013 transportation information should be arriving by mail to Pottsgrove School District families on or about August 4.” The page contained links to what were thought by The Post to be the just-published schedules. In the three hours (6:34 a.m. -9:44 a.m.) since initial publication of this story, our readers reported those links erroneously pointed to last year’s schedules. The district has since removed the links from its page and now asks parents to “check back … soon for complete 2012-2013 route information.”
District Director of Technology Michael Wagman, in a 9:46 a.m. e-mail today, confirmed the routes referenced by The Post “are not current,” although he said families did receive postcards citing their children’s “individual pick up times.”
The Post takes responsibility for and regrets the error, and any inconvenience it may have caused. It has removed the schedules posted earlier on its Resources Page.
Who are members of the Lower Pottsgrove teaching teams? Find them here
Letters sent Saturday by the district to parents and families report which students will have which teachers during the coming year. The district could also publicly release lists of each class and all its students, as in years past, but has not yet indicated it intends do so.
It did publish a list, as an Adobe Acrobat document, of members of the teaching teams for grades 3-5 in the Lower Pottsgrove center. The six teams (two for each grade), consisting of four teachers apiece, collectively will be responsible for the education of about 700 students within the building.
- The Lower Pottsgrove teacher team list is available for download from The Post‘s Resources Page, here.
What’s the new teacher like? What’s the new building like? Who else is in the class? Compare notes on Facebook
District resident Rick Rabinowitz, who months ago used Facebook pages to organize parents who unsuccessfully opposed educational centers, said Saturday he had created three new pages – all open by request to public users – to help parents collate information about who else would join their children in specific classes, and what the teachers of those classes were like.
Facebook pages are available here for:
“We have about 80 members in the Lower Pottsgrove group, and a lot less in the West and Rocks groups, but we’re adding people pretty quickly now that the teacher assignments have been mailed,” Rabinowitz said.
Hi Joe, thanks for publishing the links to our class list pages; the numbers continued to increase all weekend, but we have a long way to go before we have complete, or nearly complete, class lists.
FYI, I am fairly certain that the elementary bus lists in this article are from last year. For example, my children’s stop is listed as bus 24, picking up at 8:16. But the orange insert in the letters we got from the district on Friday said they’d be on Bus 7, picking up at 8:04. I will just add, that this means we’ll be going to the bus stop at 7:59, 1 hour before school starts!
Rick, I will confirm that the schedules are indeed wrong (they’re from last year). Our story has subsequently been corrected, and our error noted. Thanks for your attention to detail!
I do not think that the elementary routes are accurate. My daughter’s bus is not even on it. These appear to be last year’s routes.
Jeananne, you may be right. This notice appears on the district’s transportation page, here:
http://www.pgsd.org/StudentsParents/Transportation/tabid/81/Default.aspx
“2012-2013 transportation information should be arriving by mail to Pottsgrove School District families on or about August 4. Check back on this page soon for complete 2012-2013 route information for both public and non-public schools served by the Pottsgrove School District Transportation Department.” When The Post checked the page this morning at 6 a.m., that paragraph appeared and links to all five schedules were active. As of 9:39 a.m., those links have been removed. I’ll act now to amend our story. Thanks for your attention to the detail!
Joe Zlomek, Managing Editor