Local education and elected officials at a joint Hernando County meeting on Tuesday focused much of their discussion on student pickup and drop‑off patterns, school stacking that blocks neighborhood roads and local efforts to build sidewalks to improve safe walk routes to schools.

Superintendent Ray Pinder, School Board Chair Shannon Rodriguez and multiple county commissioners described longstanding stacking at campuses including JD Floyd and Challenger K‑8, and noted traffic has sometimes spilled into neighboring residential streets. Pinder and board members said the district has considered operational changes — double‑lining stacks on campus, using alternate queuing areas and temporarily directing traffic onto school property — but that these measures are expensive and constrained by available land and drainage requirements.

A recurring policy point: commissioners and school officials urged a change to state law governing “courtesy” or zone busing. Former and current board members recalled that courtesy busing within two miles of a school was eliminated in 2014 to reduce costs; that change, they said, contributed to the rise in vehicle stacking. Commissioner Jerry Johnson and other speakers said the county has included a request on its legislative platform to narrow the no‑bus zone to one mile or to otherwise expand school bus eligibility for younger students.

County planner Michelle Miller and MPO director Bob Esposito described funding pathways for sidewalks, noting Hernando County is LAP‑certified for FDOT Local Agency Program grants and maintains an unfunded Transportation Alternatives (TA) list of pedestrian projects. Esposito said safe‑routes‑to‑school grants typically require a letter of support from the superintendent and the school principal and that right‑of‑way acquisition is often a precondition of state or federal funding. Todd Crosby, county engineer, said constructing contiguous sidewalks—particularly across drainage infrastructure and in places with large heritage trees—adds engineering cost and complexity.

Speakers pressed two practical proposals: design and phase sidewalks so projects are fundable through MPO and FDOT programs, and pilot “electronic queuing” or reservation systems that would assign arrival times to parents to prevent early lining up on neighborhood streets. Pinder said the district has explored reservation and queuing approaches but has not found a district‑level technology that reliably enforces arrival times, and he noted that enforcement off school property falls to law enforcement agencies.

Why it matters: the conversation combined short‑term operational fixes (queuing and enforcement) with longer‑term capital needs (sidewalks and bus‑service policy). Officials said addressing both is necessary to reduce danger at high‑traffic intersections and to keep students on campus rather than walking through neighborhoods.

What happened next: Commissioners asked county and MPO staff to refine sidewalk project lists, to prioritize short segments that provide neighborhood connections to schools, and to pursue grant applications with letters of support from the superintendent. Several commissioners and school officials also agreed to continue discussing legislative advocacy on bus‑zone distance.