Every student in Stoughton in need of a bus will have one when the school year begins next week, and the district’s superintendent says the commentary around the issue from outside town has been ‘absurd.’

Initially, officials in the Greater Boston district feared that 150 secondary students who applied for a bus would be without a seat when the year starts Sept. 4. That panic dissipated when two administrators recently resigned, freeing up enough savings to bring back at least one bus.

Superintendent Joseph Baeta brought the development to light in a Monday briefing before he and School Committee Chairwoman Katherine Weiss delivered more details Tuesday night.

The bus being added to the fleet for middle and high school students will be a double run, meaning it will be doing two runs each for the morning and afternoon commutes, Baeta said.

He emphasized that this is solely for the start of the school year.

“Once we have everybody on the buses,” Baeta said, “and we start to see the changes that take place in the first two weeks, three weeks, we will update this with parents and families on a regular basis.”

Parents and students learned of the bus deficit earlier this month, when the district announced that a lack of funding had led to the shortage of buses — and that the 150 students would need to find another way of getting to school.

Weiss, during Tuesday’s meeting, walked through how the budget shortfall for transportation came to be even after the district sought and received a 7.1% increase in the school’s fiscal 2025 budget.

Applications for bus transportation were up this year, Weiss highlighted, as was cited in a letter Baeta sent to parents earlier this month.

Last year 1,367 applications were received, and this year it was 1,529 — an increase of 162. Students were placed in bus seats in the order their applications were received, Baeta wrote, but the school ran out of seats before it got through applications

“Unlike other districts in the news, like Boston, Stoughton’s school-aged population is rapidly growing,” Weiss said. “This increase is separate from, and in addition to, the students coming to us from the sheltered populations hosted at the two hotels in town.”

Baeta added, “It is imperative to note that we could not have guessed that 162 more students this year wanted to take transportation than last year.”

The commentary from outside town that the superintendent was referring to has been centered around how the state is funding two buses for the 200-plus migrant families living in state-backed emergency shelters in town.

Baeta has been adamant that the arrival of migrant families was not the reason for the bus shortage. He acknowledged earlier this year in his budget request how the influx put “unprecedented pressures in special education, transportation, and services for English Learners.”

“The funding for these two buses does not come from our operational budget,” Baeta had said. “It is inaccurate to suggest that these children receiving busing is the reason yours did not. If we were not receiving the funding from the state for the students living in hotels/shelters, we would not be able to have these two additional buses.”

That hasn’t prevented the Massachusetts GOP from calling on Gov. Maura Healey and her administration to “take decisive action to address the migrant crisis and restore the Massachusetts education system.”

“The migrant crisis is affecting every facet of life for Massachusetts residents, and now it has reached our most vulnerable population – our children,” MASSGOP chairwoman Amy Carnevale said in a statement on Monday. “Students are being deprived of opportunities to reach their full potential as advanced placement classes are cut.”

“Parents are being forced to stretch their budgets to support their children’s passions in sports and the arts,” she added. “Bus services, once a fundamental resource for working families in Massachusetts, are being taken away.”

During Tuesday’s meeting, Baeta responded to what he described as the “politics of education.”

“It is unfortunate that outside of Stoughton, and I want to be clear: outside of Stoughton, the nastiness and the commentary that’s taking place is just defined by the word absurd,” the superintendent said, “and I will leave it at that.”

“My folks are competent,” he added, “they are working hard on behalf of the taxpayers of Stoughton and are doing their diligence to make sure these students and all students are getting on a bus as much as we can.”