Monday through Friday, nearly 8,000 Natrona County students ride buses that take them to and from their schools of choice.

Students might ride the bus for as little as 10 minutes, or log nearly three hours of riding time each day.

The Natrona County School District offers busing to students as part of its schools of choice system, at a cost of just over $1 million each year.

Getting students from point A to point B hasn't come without challenges for the district's transportation department.

"The drivers and staff here do not get nearly the credit they deserve for making open enrollment work," said Chuck Huber, the district's risk manager and director of transportation. "Without them, we wouldn't have open enrollment."

The current bus routes are hand drawn on a skeleton map the district has used for nearly 12 years, Huber said.

Donna Pagel and Toni Dodge, both with the district's transportation department, draw out the bus routes, making changes or adding lines as needed. But they only have so many buses they can schedule, and only so much time to get kids to school before the first bell rings.

"I think we are a lot more accommodating than other districts," Pagel said.

Certain schools are used as bus transfer points, where students are dropped off and later catch other buses that will take them to their schools or to other transfers.

The format has created those marathon bus rides, but it'd be nearly impossible to bus everyone without transfers, Huber said.

"We have kids that go from Evansville to Oregon Trail," Huber said. "There's no way to get them there in a straight shot."

Before schools of choice, the district used computer software to create bus routes. The software wouldn't accommodate the transfer points necessary to bus students in Natrona's choice system, Huber said.

Huber said he's researched hundreds of other school districts claiming to have schools of choice, trying to figure out how they handle transportation. Huber has yet to find a district that operates its choice system as freely as Natrona County does.

"We wish we could find another school district we could share with, or copy," Huber said. "We don't have a blueprint to go by."

A software program called VersaTrans has the potential to handle Natrona County's system, Huber said, and to take a little pressure off Dodge and Pagel. The program comes with a price tag of $28,650, which includes training.

The new software would utilize a database of all students, including individual addresses, and merge that information with a map of Casper and its surrounding area. The software would then plots the quickest routes for transporting students.

"It will actually do the routing that we're currently doing by hand," Huber said.

Reach education reporter Jasa Santos at (307) 266-0593 or at Jasa.Santos@trib.com.

Student population: 11,500

Schools in Casper: 36

Buses, vans and other school vehicles: 109

Average monthly fuel cost: $55,000 to $60,000

Cost for activities, field trips and other travel: $400,000 a year

Distance traveled daily: 7,300 miles

Average number of students bused daily: 7,500 to 8,000

Who's walking and who's taking the bus

Natrona County School District maps the number of students living within a certain radius of the school they attend. The following numbers are the percentages of students who live within one mile of the school they attend, as of Jan. 8.

Oregon Trail Elementary: 63.42

Paradise Valley Elementary: 57.75

North Casper Elementary: 51.98

Sagewood Elementary: 50.45

Pineview Elementary: 49.78

Crest Hill Elementary: 47.88

Southridge Elementary: 47.67

Willard Elementary: 44.75

Evansville Elementary: 44.57

Manor Heights Elementary: 43.12

Grant Elementary: 42.74

Verda James Elementary: 40.79

Cottonwood Elementary: 37.17

Mountain View Elementary: 36.36

Frontier Middle School: 36.10

Mills Elementary: 33.82

University Park Elementary: 31.43

Kelly Walsh High School: 31.23

Park Elementary: 30.74

Centennial Junior High: 29.27

CY Junior High: 26.01

Woods Learning Center: 22.15

Roosevelt High School: 20.44

Poison Spider School: 17.95

Dean Morgan Junior High: 15.56

Fort Caspar Academy: 15.04

Casper Classical Academy: 14.29

Natrona County High School: 12.39]]->