Students at Penn Hills Elementary School will be seeing some familiar faces on the bus starting next week.
The school district will begin a trial program with staff members riding the bus with students to and from school. Superintendent John Mozzocio called it a preventive action to ensure good behavior from students.
“We want to have the best experience we possibly can when we pick these kids up from the stops until we get to school,” Mozzocio said.
The trial run will begin with randomly selected buses that transport elementary school students. Staff members will ride with the different buses for the last weeks of the school year.
“If it works, we’ll look to expand it,” Mozzocio said. “If it doesn’t, we’ll go back to the drawing board.”
He said the district receives an “elevated level” of behavior referrals about students on elementary school buses, and the district wants to remain proactive about the situation.
The bus monitor positions were opened to all employees in the district. Mozzocio said some of the schools’ paraprofessionals and classroom teachers will be sitting in as monitors. According to the school board’s most recent agenda, they will be paid $30 an hour.
“Why we’re using staff is because these people already have relationships with the kids,” Mozzocio said. “They’re familiar with them. They see them in school. We feel that we’ll get better results than we would just having strangers that students don’t have relationships with.”
Haley Daugherty is a TribLive reporter covering local politics, feature stories and Allegheny County news. A native of Pittsburgh, she lived in Alabama for six years. She joined the Trib in 2022 after graduating from Chatham University. She can be reached at hdaugherty@triblive.com.