Approximately $820,000 of those reductions came from transportation, forcing the district to make difficult operational decisions.
“We eliminated high school busing,” he explains. “We went to a two-mile walk radius for all students, which is the state’s minimum requirement.”
For many superintendents, changes of this magnitude can feel overwhelming. For Hatton, who had been in the role for less than three years, the situation became a leadership test: how to protect families, support staff, and maintain relative service with fewer resources.
Recognizing an Untapped Operational Advantage
As district leaders worked to understand the full impact of the funding shortfall, Hatton learned that the transportation department already had access to data-driven planning tools for school transportation operations that were not being fully utilized.
“What we discovered was that we were not leveraging this really powerful, amazing tool to help us route our district efficiently,” he says. “We found out that we had not updated our maps in 10 years.”
Kelly Cheney, director of communications, noted in a story in a local newspaper, The Courier, that before utilizing a transportation and routing planning platform, “our transportation department was hand-routing every single student who rode the bus, manually inputting the information for each student and then tweaking it as the year went on … again manually.”
She told the paper, “Adjustments were not able to be made quickly for special circumstances, like construction, for example, so buses were delayed.”
With fewer staff and limited margin for error, those inefficiencies became increasingly difficult to sustain.
By fully implementing a digital routing and data management approach, the district was able to modernize how transportation decisions were made and communicated.
Modernizing Transportation Operations
By fully implementing a digital routing and data management approach, the district was able to modernize how transportation decisions were made and communicated.
The updated system allowed the department to:
“This program will allow us to immediately message parents of any and all buses as soon as it is needed,” Cheney told The Courier. “Substitute drivers will have turn-by-turn directions to follow as they drive a new route, and student stop information will be updated daily.”
At the same time, the district was navigating significant staffing changes.
“In early June, we realized we lost our router,” Hatton says. “She had been routing our district for like a decade.”
Rather than compounding the challenge, district leadership used the transition as an opportunity to rethink departmental roles and responsibilities.
Aligning Structure, Technology, and Leadership
Instead of refilling a high-cost director position, Hatton restructured the department and created a transportation manager role focused on operational expertise and system knowledge.
“We decided not to replace our director of transportation position,” he says. “We went with a transportation manager, and she’s been amazing.”
This combination of clearer leadership and better use of data allowed the district to move away from paper-based processes and toward a more sustainable, accountable model.
“We had stacks of hundreds of pages of paper spread across tables all summer,” Hatton explains. “Moving to a centralized system changed how we worked.”
The district rebuilt its routing process, cleaned up rider data, and upgraded GPS , so routes were no longer guesswork.
Accountability to the Community
For Hatton, those changes were not just about efficiency — they were about meeting community expectations during a period of significant disruption.
“We feel this responsibility to live up to the expectations that the community has with a high level of service,” he says.
In response, the board of education outlined a set of goals focused on rebuilding and long-term improvement.
"I’m calling it our Path to Progress as we rebuild our district,” Hatton shares.
Lessons for District Leaders
Findlay City Schools’ experience underscores a broader lesson for school business and district leaders: during times of financial pressure, success often depends on how well existing resources — people, data, and systems — are aligned.
By modernizing transportation operations, improving data visibility, and adjusting leadership structures, districts can better navigate uncertainty while maintaining essential services for students and families.