TAYLOR COUNTY, Ky. — Eighteen school districts in the commonwealth qualified for funding for an early learning bus. Taylor County was one district to receive the $125,000 to make the project possible.

What You Need To Know

  • The Taylor County School District recieved  $125,000 grant for an early learning bus

  • The district's transportation department turned a school bus into a mobile classroom

  • The bus will stop in rural parts of the community to help give families easy access to early learning

  • The bus will make its first stop on Sept. 20, 2024

The new early learning bus will roll in to the Taylor County School District next month.

“I think the bus is amazing. We have worked super hard to get it ready,” said Brandy McCubbin, director of Taylor County Primary Family Resource Center.

McCubbin is in her 17th year in the district and is the new director of Taylor County Primary Family Resource Center. She’ll be overseeing the new bus.

“We have this set up like a typical preschool classroom, it’s just much smaller, and then we have our art center, we have our literacy center, we have science, we have math fine motor, and we have our kitchen,” she said.

The bus will make stops at designated community sites to serve families who live in rural areas of the approximately 260-square-mile county.

“It really met a need in our community. We definitely have transportation issues in the community where certain families don’t have access to early childhood education, and especially for that birth to five-year-old age group. This bus provides them an opportunity to be met where they’re at,” said Lindsey McPherson, grant writer for Taylor County School District.

Curriculum will focus on language, gross and fine motor skills, self-help, social skills and cognitive skills.

Taylor County Schools joins 17 other districts that have received a $125,000 grant from the Kentucky Department of Education for an early learning bus.

“The main thing they were looking for was statistics, like why does our community need this bus? So, we gave statistics about poverty levels in the community, transportation levels, access to early learning, and then really the biggest need, which is kindergarten readiness,” said McPherson.

The district’s transportation department worked for about two months to give a bus nearing retirement a brand-new life.

“We pretty much gutted it and started from scratch from the inside. We completely put new flooring in it, we rewired it, we put a generator on it, and we’ve done all that work ourselves, in-house,” said Guy Wood, Transportation Director, Taylor County School District.

McCubbin said the bus is all about getting children ready for kindergarten

“Just diving in with the parents and figuring out how to raise kids, right, it takes a village, and this is going to be huge in our community. So, we’re super excited about it,” said McCubbin.

The bus will make its first stop on Sept. 20, 2024. Stops will be from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. on Fridays.

A list of the fall stops can be found on Taylor County schools’ social media page.

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