DOI: 10.5061/dryad.z08kprrqv
title: Wake County public school system bus route data for AY 2023-24

description: The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) published research in 2014 that
 recommended later school start times (after 8:30 AM) for adolescents to
 promote their health and academic success. Wake County Public School
 System (WCPSS) is the largest school district in North Carolina, with
 nearly 200 schools and over 160,000 students, and all its middle school
 and high school students start school at 8:30 AM or earlier. In the
 2023-2024 school year, a national bus driver shortage made daily student
 transportation challenging and delayed the school board’s ability to
 prioritize school start time changes. This study used a mathematical
 optimization model following a Bin Packing approach to minimize the number
 of buses required to complete all the routes in the nine sub-districts
 within Wake County. Scenarios that changed the school start times to abide
 by AAP recommendations were generated and tested using bus route
 information from the 2023-2024 school year. Results show that areas with a
 higher concentration of magnet and special schools require a greater
 increase in the number of buses needed to swap elementary and high school
 start times. The results also indicate significant interactions between
 the sub-districts, which challenge WCPSS’s ability to logistically isolate
 a sub-district to use as a case study for start time changes. This
 research investigates the current relationship between transportation
 requirements and school start times. It provides analysis that could
 inform decision-making and planning as WCPSS hires more bus drivers and
 pursues the best outcomes for its students.
description: The data for various Wake County, NC-based schools was collected
 via a webscraping script using R from publicly available
 websites.
description: ## Wake County public school system bus route data Dataset contains school
 bus route information for each of the nine sub-districts in Wake County
 Public School System (WCPSS) as found from the individual school web pages
 in the fall of the 2023-2024 school year. ## Description of data and file
 structure There is one .csv file for each sub-district and they are titled
 District1 - District9. Each sub-district (District1 District9) has seven
 columns: * BusName Text containing the bus name used by the school it
 supports. * SchoolName Name of school(s) that the bus supports. If the bus
 is known to complete routes for students from multiple schools, the
 schools are separated by /. * SchoolTier C, E, H, or M for combined,
 elementary school, high school, or middle school, respectively. Combined
 buses are those that are known to support more than one school. *
 RouteStartTime Start time listed for the bus route in the format HH:MM AM.
 * RouteEndTime End time listed for the bus route in the format HH:MM AM.
 This is the time that the bus arrives at the school it supports, or if it
 supports multiple schools, it is the time that it arrives at the school
 with the latest start time. * RouteTime The difference between
 RouteEndTime and RouteStartTime in minutes. * SchoolStartTime The start
 time for the school that the bus route supports, in the format HH:MM AM.
 If the bus route supports multiple schools, this is the latest school
 start time that the bus route supports. Note: The data does not contain
 any records pertaining to a human individual or identity. ### References
 Kay, W. 2025. *Using Bin Packing Optimization to Investigate the
 Transportation Challenges Impeding School Start Time Changes in Wake
 County Public Schools*. Masters thesis, North Carolina State University,
 Raleigh, NC.
 [https://www.lib.ncsu.edu/resolver/1840.20/45193](https://www.lib.ncsu.edu/resolver/1840.20/45193)