Jerome School District's self-run busing system is off to a much smoother start in its second year, following a chaotic launch in 2025 that forced the district to cancel three days of classes. Jerome School District's bus system rebounds after rocky first yearWhen the district launched its own transportation department from scratch last year, problems surfaced almost immediately. Discrepancies in a database of 1,200 student addresses, combined with a new mapping service that misidentified dirt tracks through farm fields as streets, created widespread confusion during the first week of school.Superintendent Brent Johnson acknowledged the scale of what the district took on."This is a big undertaking, starting your own transportation department from scratch and looking at optimizing routes," Johnson said.Now in his third year leading the district, Johnson says the focus has shifted from major transitions to refinement."Year three, now we're not having that big change. We're really trying to slow down and refine and really maximize all the things that we have done to help our staff and students," Johnson said.Transportation Director Tim Hicks said the work done over the past 15 months has paid off heading into the new school year."Compared to last year, this was a great start to a year," Hicks said.Hicks credited a rebuilt and validated address database for the improvement, saying any issues this year have been isolated rather than widespread.RELATED | Jerome City Council votes to pull Flock Safety camera funding from 2027 budget over privacy concerns"Over the last 15 months, the team has worked really hard to build a database that we trust and we have validated and if there are address changes, we address them appropriately," Hicks said.Johnson says the energy around the start of the school year remains a highlight of the job, regardless of the challenges behind the scenes."Everybody's excited to get their class list and bring their supplies in and see who their teacher is, it's just a lot of great energy around the start of any school year," Johnson said.This story was reported on-air by a journalist and has been converted to this platform with the assistance of AI. Our editorial team verifies all reporting on all platforms for fairness and accuracy. ...read more read less