2021-10-08 Noticias de ISLA y ISLA PTO

October 8, 2021

Emily Smith

Administrative Assistant

PTO Community Meeting

The first community PTO meeting will be held October 12th at 6:30pm by Zoom. Everyone is welcome to attend! The PTO board is looking forward to a great year ahead! During the meeting we will share PTO news, plans for the year, and have Q&A time for the community.

Follow the link here for the agenda and Zoom information:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/10C2fFPmt3Yb7L0M4INsRUKgqgdKkqjSO_a-Mjcd-Xr0/edit?usp=sharing

Picture Day Volunteers Needed:

Fun volunteer opportunity! ISLA is looking for a few volunteers to help picture day run smoothly by organizing kids before pictures to help smooth collars, hair, etc.  Spanish not required.  All volunteers will need to follow ISLA's Vaccination Policy.  

Link: https://www.signupgenius.com/go/70A0D4FA4A62AA1FF2-isla25

Transportation Hub

The Transportation Committee met 10/4/2021 and discussed a number of topics related to busing.  We have seen progress with removal of “dead stops” and consolidating stops - for the first time this year all ISLA buses got to school before school started! While this is a success, we have a lot more work to do to achieve our ultimate goal and commitment to the community: to get all busses arriving and departing on time from school AND to get all bus routes to a run time less than 60 minutes.

We greatly appreciate and understand the toll this process is taking on our kiddos and the impact it is having on their ability to attend school and have some predictability in a time when emotions are already heightened. We are trying to get to a solution as quickly as we can.

To this end, we are working with Northstar to re-route the current seven routes to eight routes. There are limited options to do more to shorten the current seven routes. While this is a big financial investment, we also see it as a critically important investment in the community.

Northstar is working on mapping out these new routes and we are hoping they will be getting back to us with new proposed routes that meet our criteria very soon. We are fortunate in that Northstar felt that they would have a driver to support this request, despite the nationwide concerns for driver shortages.

As of the time of this update, we do not have a specific timeline on when we will make the transition to eight routes. We all share a goal of working together with Northstar, ISLA administration, and relevant committees to make this happen as quickly as is logistically feasible.

A few other updates:

  • Sra. de la Cruz has graciously agreed to join the transportation committee and will be working on the use of seat assignments on the bus. We are aware that seating assignments are being utilized on bus 5 and there are concerns about how this is being implemented by the driver. She is working on strategies to approach this particular situation differently.
  • Sra. de la Cruz is also considering other behavioral and educational strategies to ensure everyone’s safety on the bus. Students can be looking forward to bus safety training soon.
  • If families are having difficulties with the Versatrans bus tracking app itself, please contact Tyler (tyler@northstarlines.com) or Tim (tim@northstarlines.com) at Northstar.
  • All other transportation concerns can be sent to Emily Smith or another member of the transportation committee (transportation@isla.school)
  • Finally, it is a federally mandated requirement that bus drivers wear their face masks. If this is not happening consistently, please let us know via email and Northstar will correct.

As always, we appreciate your patience and encourage you to reach out with any questions or concerns.

Isabelle Krisch (ikrisch@isla.school)
Transportation committee member
School Board member

Stay Tuned for DDLM:


The annual Dia De los Muertos (DDLM) event will be virtual this year, but no doubt a ton of fun! Stay tuned for more details to come.