Committee formed with Board of Education:
With the cooperation of the b/o/e, a committee of three board members and four drivers, Clare, Mary, Karen and Bob has been formed.
At this time the committee's main concern is school bus safety. At a meeting in early October a number of issues were addressed, among them, seating capacity, discipline of students, buses carrying transfer students for Regional 7, making Oak St. (St. Anthony's) one way, putting air conditioning in buses that transport special needs students.

( 1 ) Air Conditioning:
This problem is currently being addressed. The Advisory Committee for the Disabled has been in contact with Laidlaw and told them that the bus used to transport students to Windsor must be equipped with A/C and that Laidlaw is to assume the cost without passing it on to the town. It is hoped that this will include all type "2" buses, since there are times when buses are interchanged for use.

( 2 ) Work being farmed out to Torrington and other areas that should be assigned to OUR drivers:
This year has seen a continued stream of charter and field trip work going to drivers other than Winsted employees.
We have been told that this is the result of our terminal telling schools that we do not have either enough buses or enough drivers to handle their needs.

The latest instance involved the Pearson School. When the Pearson School first called the Winsted Terminal and asked for three buses they were told that Winsted had no drivers, or buses to cover the trip, we aren't sure which excuse was given.
The work was given to Torrington (2 drivers) and Thomaston(1driver).
A point to remember about this, Hartland had no school on the day in question.
We are also trying to determine why the Hartland School no longer requests our services for field trips.
This work is now being done by Legyt and or M & J

Another example of work not being done out of our terminal: The Wheeler Clinic
We have been told that this work has been combined with Torrington as a method for saving Winsted and Torrington on the cost of transporting four students, two from each community, with each town paying half the cost.
We aren't sure if this was true in the past, but through the last week of October 2001 there were zero students from Torrington being transported to Wheeler by this Torrington van.

Are Winsted tax dollars being used to pay Torrington to do this work??
Laidlaw has given different excuses for giving this work away, one was that parents had requested a certain Torrington driver, the truth is, multiple drivers have driven this route

( 3 ) What's going on with the lease:
Without getting involved in a long story, here are the facts as reported to us this week. A lease was signed, just this month (November), but only after Laidlaw was to be served with eviction papers.
There was no lease in place in October when the signs first went up and we asked what was going on.
We are told that the lease is for five years, furthermore the property is still for sale.
Laidlaw supplied none of this information; we had to find it out on our own.

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