Bus repairs on pace for start of school

The school buses that transport Sedalia School District 200 students are on the road to recovery after most were significantly damaged in the May 25 tornado.

A couple of weeks after the tornado destroyed the First Student bus barn, left three buses as total losses and damaged nearly every bus in the fleet, contract manager Connie Miller and her team took up residence in a former auto repair shop at 32nd Street and Erika Avenue to begin rebuilding.

First Student has contracted with ServPro of Marshall to clean the broken glass and debris from the buses, a task it is carrying out in a parking lot at Smith-Cotton High School. Al Scheppers Motor Co. of Jefferson City is handling the body work; the company works on two buses at a time, repairs them and returns them.

At the former Jeff’s Garage, four First Student mechanics are performing preventive maintenance and other work to ensure that buses will be safe to roll out on Aug. 25, the first day of school.

“We’ll be ready,” Miller said.

Before the tornado, half the buses in the Sedalia district were equipped with cameras, Miller said, but all will have cameras after the repairs are done and new buses are transferred in by First Student.

Assistant Superintendent Brad Pollitt said the month-to-month lease that First Student contracted for the garage space “has worked out wonderfully.” While the district contracts with First Student for transportation services, Pollitt said the district had made some requests for changes. The destruction of the bus barn means that a new 60-foot by 80-foot building will be erected on the same property, and the structure will include electrical hookups, a modern meeting room for safety sessions and a separate dispatch room to help reduce ambient noise.

It also will include what Miller called “a scaredy-cat hole” — a secure space for workers to go in case of extreme weather conditions. She said that when the tornado was bearing down on the area May 25, she and some mechanics took shelter in the cellar of a nearby home.

In the meantime, the plan is to move the new and repaired buses to the old bus barn property, at 3507 S. Park Ave., where a temporary trailer likely will be set up to handle dispatching until the new structure is finished sometime around Thanksgiving or Christmas.

Miller said she has spent almost 31 years driving down the same road — 32nd Street — to get to work. On Tuesday’s morning commute, she caught herself heading toward the old location on Park Avenue instead of the temporary office on Erika Avenue.

By the end of the year, her old habit will be new again.