City sees costly school bus rides
Officials told they’re second only to Buffalo per student
Boston spends more per student on transportation than any other district nationwide besides Buffalo, public school officials said Monday as they warned they appear to be on track to overshoot their already sky-high transportation budget by millions yet again.
The district budgeted $125.6 million for transportation this year, and was on track to exceed that by $2.5 million as of the last update, which came in December, Ed Pesce of BPS told city councilors on Monday.
This type of discussion has become an annual event, as the district regularly overshoots its transportation budget by multiple millions of dollars, even when increasing the budgeted amount every year and busing fewer kids to school.
“We have been having this conversation every year,” City Councilor Matt O’Malley said. “This is my 10th year on the body.”
Several factors contribute heavily to these figures being so high. The district transports 24,269 students to 235 different schools — and 22% of those students are taken to 115 non-BPS schools outside of Boston.
The fact that the city’s schools each draw from across Boston means that some kids are bused across the city in nearly empty vehicles. Of 3,401 daily trips within Boston, 362 have four or fewer students aboard.
Pesce said that there are 32 schools in and out of Boston where only one student is bused, and 44 schools where the district only buses two to five kids. Further, the rising numbers of bus monitors required continues to drive up costs.
Pesce said this has resulted in Boston having the second-highest per-student spending in the country, other officials told him recently.
“The only one that is spending more is Buffalo,” Pesce said.
Last year, BPS Chief Operations Officer John Hanlon gave this presentation, but he remains on administrative leave for reasons the school department won’t say. Pesce was joined by Superintendent Brenda Cassellius’ interim chief of staff Charlene Briner and Sam DePina, the secondary superintendent of school operations and safety.
Briner noted that the district is several months into working with an independent schools transportation consultant who will focus mainly on on-time performance and safety. The consultant will come back in the next couple of months with recommendations meant to be introduced for next school year.
City Council Education chair Annissa Essaibi-George, who had called for the hearing, said that those are obviously important, but costs need to be a factor, too.
“The effort’s really to rein in those costs because those are dollars we don’t have take from other efforts in our schools,” EssaibiGeorge said.