‘We’ve been deprived’ Reservation schools hope for bus funding
INDIAN WELLS – Every morning, Nora John and her two children climb into her pickup truck and drive.
They cover miles over sloping hills that tilt the truck sideways, through washes that often flood with water and mud, and between rock formations to reach their destination: the bus stop.
The kids climb onto the yellow school bus, pulled up on the rubblelining the Navajo Nation freeway, and spend hours every weekday driving to and from school.
It’s an exhausting, yet important, ritual for
families like the Johns who live on the reservation. For them, the buses are a lifeline to an education they may not receive otherwise.
“Without a bus, that would impact us a lot,” John said. “We’d have to take care of our own transportation for our kids, we’d have to drive them into town.”
The bus service is a lifeline districts in and around the reservation struggle to pay for every year as they grapple with heavy costs associated with the long, often mountainous drives and a long history of cuts in education funding by the state.
The situation puts districts like John’s, the Holbrook Unified School District, in a predicament.
On one hand, students living in highpoverty areas likely wouldn’t be able to attend school without a safe, robust bus system.
But those buses also suck up hundreds of thousands of dollars every year that could instead go to improved facilities, more instructional resources and teacher pay.
“Anytime you buy a bus, when you have 37 buses, you’re offsetting an opportunity cost for something,” said Robbie Koerperich, Holbrook Unified School District superintendent. “Something else is not getting addressed when you’re buying a bus.”
When Gov. Doug Ducey announced in June that, using $38 million from a legal settlement, he would buy 281 buses across the state for low-income schools, Koerperich was thrilled.
The money would replace vehicles that have more than 100,000 miles on them or are more than 15 years old in districts where more than 60 percent or more students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch.
By Koerperich’s estimate, his district would be eligible for two new buses. And for Holbrook, that would make all the difference, even if just for a year.
Not only would the money free funds to invest in students like the Johns, it would help the district replace buses older than most of students they educate — their oldest from 2002.
“We’ve been deprived in this area, I would say, probably since 2008,” Koerperich said. “We haven’t had these capital funds to be able to adequately upgrade our fleets.”
Last school year, Holbrook’s fleet of buses drove students 513,175 miles, on and off the reservation. The routes, dotted with potholes and rubble, cover an area larger than Rhode Island.
“There’s no AC and if (the bus) breaks down on the side of the highway, we’re in big trouble,” Shawn Tow, Holbrook’s director of transportation, said. “It’s not like we’re going down Chandler Boulevard. We’re going down the highways. We’re either on the I-40 or going up on the res.”
Last year, the district spent $1.9 million on transportation costs, $300,000 of which went to buying new buses after two had what Tow called “catastrophic engine failures.”
It was a large chunk of money for the district, but money that had to be spent.
When Ducey’s office announced the funding in June, administration officials assembled a list of 132 schools that may qualify for new school buses, saying it was “only an estimate based on historical data and may not reflect the full universe of districts that are eligible.”
They used their estimates to divide the funds up by county. More schools meant more buses would be allocated to that specific county. Navajo County would receive 12, Apache would receive eight, while more densely populated areas like Maricopa County would receive 85.
In the end,the schools that receive buseswill be determined by an application process and the base criteria.
To receive aid, Daniel Ruiz, a spokesman for Ducey’s office, said it’s “incumbent on school districts to apply and meet that criteria.”
Some districts grappling with more extreme conditions may be left behind because they don’t meet Ducey’s specific standards.
That’s the case for Chinle Unified School District, a district located in the northern Navajo Nation.
Where Holbrook’s buses drive along freeways, Chinle’s four-wheel-drive buses plow through unimproved roads, red rock valleys, washes and flood zones to get to students. Their buses take a regular beating.
In 2015, an investigation revealed that two out of five of Chinle’s 2013-15 bus inspections resulted in failures for “major defects.” Failure rates in the district where twice the state average.
The district spends more than $1 million a year on bus replacement alone, buying anywhere between eight to 10 buses.
“When I first heard there were a number of buses being purchased around the state, I thought, ‘Wow, that is going to be great. We’re going to benefit,’ because I knew we had high mileage buses and we have a need,” said Quincy Natay, superintendent of the Chinle district.
Where most districts get 10 to 15 years out of their vehicles driving on paved roads, Chinle’s buses last eight or nine years.
Because of the constant turnover, none of their buses have made it past 10 years, let alone Ducey’s requirement of 15 years.
“We were disappointed, of course,”
Natay said.
Asked what would happen to districts who don’t meet the requirements the administration set forth, Ruiz said the administration is “hopeful that with continued investment they will get the resources they need for transportation.”
Like Holbrook, Natay said Chinle hoped to use the funds to invest in other areas such as staffing and their classrooms.
“It would have ... just given us a little more flexibility and breathing room,” Natay said.
Other educators were quick to say that the policy ignores areas in Arizona most in need of the buses.
“Your bus can drive 100,000 on pavement and mine can drive 100,000 on dirt roads,” said Tom Powers, school superintendent for Greenlee County. “We both get there, but I won’t have wheels or tires and your bus will look pristine. You cannot compare a city route to a rural route.”
Even with the funding, parents and educators say the buses only would be a start to addressing the transportation demands on the reservation.
When John, her husband and kids moved back to the Navajo Nation from Flagstaff it was to save money because she couldn’t work a full-time job and help catch her daughter up in school.
But as John’s kids entered the Holbrook school system, she slowly learned that fewer resources and lowered bus access put many reservation kids at a disadvantage.
“Less bus access, it does make an impact,” John said, “Especially for the very low-income kid.”
Her son, for instance, had to pull out of football his senior year because of the commute. On game days, he’d often get to bed around midnight and then be up again before the sun rose. The early mornings and late nights became a sort of exhausting wash, rinse and repeat.
And her kids were some of the lucky students in their area of Indian Wells.
About 65 percent of the population don’t have running water in their homes and 15 percent don’t have electricity. Families work long hours and live far off the freeway where the buses stop.
John’s schedule allowed her to pick her kids up from the bus stop and drive a relatively short distance to do so. But, if students didn’t have a parent to drive them to the stops, they would trek long distances through whatever weather the day presented.
“I would see this guy who lives behind that mountain,” John said, motioning to a far-off mountain range as she drove past it. “His parents were never there. Sometimes I would give him a ride. No one should be letting him walk, especially during the wintertime or when it’s raining or snowing.”
Other students would commute hundreds of miles a day.
In one of Holbrook’s most extreme cases, one girl drove nearly 300 miles every day from her home in a far northern town, Lukachukai. She would drive hours to the bus stop, spend more two hours on the bus, then return home on the same route, said Alfred Clark, the district’s parent liaison.
“(People) who grew up in the cities and town, don’t know what we have to go through to survive here,” Clark said. “To be successful, you have to live in both worlds.”
In those cases, extracurriculars, tutoring and after-school activities would fall by the wayside. The longer the commute, the less time those students had to do homework, study or simply rest, said Cynthia Nixon, lead bus driver for Indian Wells Elementary School and a Holbrook driver of 13 years.
Nixon would often see children as young as 3 spend hours on the bus daily. Early in the morning, students would try and catch sleep on her bus with mixed results.
It was a struggle she faced with her sons, too.
“It is unfair, I would say,” Nixon said. “Just from experience, my older son, he didn’t make the team his senior year in baseball just because he couldn’t stay after school to do conditioning. He didn’t want to stay late because he would get hungry.”
For rural districts that have received funding for new buses in the past, including the Safford Unified School District, the breathing room the money provided opened up a wealth of resources.
Ken VanWinkle, superintendent of the southeastern Arizona district, said his schools weren’t eligible for Ducey’s settlement funding because a few years ago their voters passed a bond that would bankroll new buses.
“We needed buses with air conditioning,” VanWinkle said. “We needed buses that would transfer students safely so we didn’t have to worry about any breakdowns.”