The Tamaqua Area School District is ready to welcome back teachers and students next week as the new school year begins, its superintendent said Tuesday.

Teachers return for in-service days on Monday and Tuesday and students will begin classes Wednesday, said Ray Kinder, superintendent.

“So, we’re looking forward to that and having all the kids back,” he said.

The board approved bus runs for the school year which will be available on the district website and through the portal for parents, Kinder said.

New this year will be a color coded system for buses for the district’s youngest students, he said, hoping to eliminate the problem with students getting on the wrong bus.

“Every year, it seems the first couple days of school … there is always a lot of confusion, especially with our younger kids,” Kinder said. “There’s always somebody ‘lost my kid,’ ‘my kid got on the wrong bus,’ ‘the teacher put the kid on the wrong bus.’”

The district has tried a number of things over the years, such as putting cards with bus numbers in the students’ backpacks, he said. Administrators realized that there are a lot of buses with numbers in the 20s and 30s, and it might be hard to see the right numbers as bus pulls away.

Now, students will have a card with a color, such as red, and the bus will have a colored card in the window, Kinder said. The bus driver can also look for children’s bus tag color as they get on, he said.

They plan to do this for kindergarten, kindergarten plus and first grade, and possibly second grade, Kinder said.

“These are little kids,” he said, noting when you ask them if they go on a specific bus, they say they do, when they don’t.

“That’s something different we’re looking at this year,” Kinder said. “We hope that it helps and we ask parents for their cooperation and understanding as we go through it.”

The district already kicked off sports practices in the past two weeks, and band camp started more than a couple weeks ago, Kinder said. Drama club and cheerleading have been going all summer, he said.

“So, we are in the swing of things with our activities,” Kinder said.