Consultant analysis: moving school start times alone unlikely to be cost-neutral; board agrees further study and boundary-level options needed

Poudre School District R-1’s continuing debate over bell times and bus routing stretched into the late hours of the Feb. 25 board meeting, with a transportation consultant concluding that simply rearranging start-time order would not deliver the cost-neutral route reductions the district sought. Board members and staff agreed to study additional, larger changes — from grouping secondary stops to boundary-level options — and to return to the board with the results after the start of the 2025–26 school year.

What the consultant found Colton Graham, a consultant working with First Student, presented route-optimization analysis requested at a prior meeting. He told the board the district’s geography — long routes across an area described as 1.5 times the size of Rhode Island — and the existing 90-minute window between earliest and latest starts limit the number of “triple-tier” routes…