PRINEVILLE — Just after 3 p.m. every Monday through Friday, 16 yellow school buses form a long line around the side of Crook County High School.

At 3:10, just as the high school lets out for the day, the bus doors open in unison, and wave after wave of elementary and middle school students streams out, laughing, yelling and running in all directions. Teachers and aides hold the hands of younger students as groups of teenagers find their buses. Other teens head for their cars, parked in the lot next to the bus lane.

By 3:15, it’s all over: Some 1,000 students of all ages have been dropped off and made their way to another bus and now are ready to head home. And if all has gone as planned, no one has been left behind.

It’s a fast-paced, often chaotic 15 minutes that usually runs surprisingly smoothly. But in the end-of-the-day shuffle, safety and accuracy are always concerns. So the district’s new transportation director, Roger Lyle, is planning to reorganize bus routes, a move that could put an end to the transfer system, and put younger and older students on separate buses for most routes.

The new routes will be rolled out in phases, with the Juniper Canyon area being the first affected by the change.

Currently, three routes serve that area, with a fourth soon to be added to compensate for overcrowding.

Lyle said he hopes to have most of the new routes up and running by the time students return from winter break in January.

School officials worry that in the current system, students could be picked up by unauthorized parents or other adults without the knowledge of bus drivers or monitors. Keeping track of all the students is simply not feasible with the transfer system, said Crook County Superintendent Steve Swisher.

“This has been a long-standing question for us,” Swisher said. “We have over 3,000 square miles of school district and 3,200 kids, and right now, we have this big transfer point of kids getting on and off the bus. Sometimes parents show up at the high school to grab their kid, and the high school staff don’t necessarily know who these parents are. … Basically, it’s not the safest of situations.”

In the current route plan, elementary and middle schoolers ride on packed buses alongside high school students. Disciplinary problems created by the gap in age and maturity levels is also a concern, according to Lyle.

“It’s a concern for me when you have K-12 on the bus,” Lyle said. “You have younger kids sitting next to high school kids, maybe hearing things they shouldn’t hear and seeing things they shouldn’t see. I have had parents who have told me they won’t put their kids on the bus because they don’t feel safe, and that’s something that really struck a chord with me.”

Lyle said he is working with a software program that maps out bus routes based on data about students’ ages, schools and home addresses. He’s still working out the final details but said the changes shouldn’t add any kind of financial burden. He said the district is already planning to purchase additional buses because of growing enrollment numbers.

“I don’t think, financially, it’s going to be that big of a deal,” Lyle said. “We’ll still have the same number of buses. There may be some areas that will have longer runs, longer rides on the bus, and some shorter, and I think that will kind of cancel itself out.”

So far, officials said reaction to the plans has been largely positive.

“If they can do (the new routes), that would probably be great,” said Leslie Crow, who rides over from Crooked River Elementary to monitor the younger students during the transfer. “We usually don’t have any big problems, but that’s because we watch really closely.”

In the meantime, however, Lyle will keep showing up at the high school every day at 3 p.m. to check in with drivers, watch for lost students and make sure the buses are all set for their homeward journeys.

“It’s chaos, but it’s controlled chaos,” he said. “Our goal is not to leave anybody behind.”