Haverhill Superintendent Margaret Marotta is on the hunt for a new supervisor of transportation—a move officials insist was in the works long before bus delays and safety concerns marred last week’s opening of school.
Posting a job description online Tuesday, Sept. 3, the school department said the new supervisor of transportation would work year-round to “assume responsibility for the comprehensive overall planning and scheduling of transportation of all eligible bus students, and all aspects of districting and redistricting student attendance boundaries.”
The position reports to Marotta for a salary determined in accordance to the administrators’ bargaining unit salary scale, the job posting said.
According to school department spokesman Shawn Regan, the school system’s most recent supervisor of transportation was Timothy Rooney. Lorraine Turell, a six-year Haverhill Public Schools employee who worked closely with Rooney, assumed the role of interim transportation director when Rooney resigned in April 2019, Regan told WHAV.
The new supervisor will also be responsible for implementing the policies and procedures set forth by the Haverhill School Committee. At the Aug. 28 Committee meeting, members vowed to take another look at the city’s rider eligibility policy.
During the same session, NRT CEO John McCarthy acknowledged the delays Haverhill families endured during the first week back to school and said his team is committed to making things right.
“I recognize and apologize for the short notice on my end. Maybe we should have bought the company in November,” McCarthy, who heads the state’s largest student transportation provider, said. “I don’t know if that would have been any better or not, but we did what we did, we’re here now and we’re going to resolve this.”
To that end, he has implemented two additional bus runs at Haverhill High School in both the morning and afternoon and is open to incorporating more physical buses to the mix. All NRT buses will be outfitted with the Synovia GPS tracker and perhaps the “Here Comes the Bus” companion app, McCarthy said.