A long overdue answer to cost of school-busing
The Senate Ways and Means Committee’s proposal to double the typical increase in unrestricted general government aid excited municipal and school officials who met virtually Tuesday afternoon, but they also asked legislators to pay attention to big spikes in student transportation costs.
The fiscal 2023 budgets put forward by the Baker administration and the House both included a $31.5 million or 2.7% increase in local aid.
But the Senate’s budget bill unveiled by leadership Tuesday proposed to double the increase to $63.1 million.
Revere Mayor Brian Arrigo pointed to parts of the House’s $49.7 billion fiscal 2023 budget that he and other local officials like, but he also called attention to an issue that he said his city and “many other communities are struggling with,” the cost of school transportation.
“We’ve seen an increase of $3 million. That line item now is in the same ballpark as my police, fire, DPW as an eight-figure, eight- digit budget,” Arrigo said.
Newton Mayor Ruthanne Fuller, who also serves as president of the Massachusetts Municipal Association, said that her city recently went out to bid for school transportation services and got one response back that represented an 8% increase in the cost to the city.
Andrea Wadsworth, president of the Massachusetts Association of School Committees and a member of the Lee School Committee, said her organization would like to see the Legislature create a funding formula for local school district transportation.
The lack of competitive bidders certainly drives up the cost of transportation, but so does the constantly increasing price of fuel.
According to AAA, the average price of a regular gallon of gas In Massachusetts has risen to $4.45, while a gallon of diesel has soared to $6.30.
While school bus transportation costs should at least remain fixed for the length of the contract, there’s no such restraint on fuel prices, only the law of supply and demand.
And given the geopolitical crisis currently playing out in Ukraine, we don’t see any easing of prices at the pump.
And we haven’t even addressed the chronic lack of school-bus drivers.
Last fall, John Descouteaux, Lowell Public Schools transportation director, said that in his nearly three decades overseeing school transportation, he’s never seen such a crisis.
Over the years, school bus driver slots had been taken by retirees and younger people who have a few hours a day to earn some extra money. That demographic, Descouteaux explained, has disappeared.
Curbing the demand for school buses would seem to be the only way to rein in transportation costs.
That might be impractical for spread- out suburban and rural communities, but for urban districts like Revere and Lowell, it would drive down costs and lead to the long overdue dismantling of a busing system designed to right racial imbalances that no longer exist.
That’s what the Fitchburg Public Schools did back in 2018.
It returned the approximately 6,000- student public school system back to neighborhood schools, abandoning a 30-year- old busing edict designed to integrate classrooms.
Fitchburg school officials realized that the city’s demographics had evolved since that previous policy was put in place.
Under the old system, bilingual and low-income students from certain neighborhoods were disproportionately assigned to different schools to balance diversity.
But by 2018, the city’s neighborhoods all shared similar demographics, making the balancing act unnecessary.
Lowell, another Gateway City with 14,000 public school students, should follow Fitchburg’s example. It can start by agreeing that a federal desegregation order put in place in the 1980s has served its purpose.
Which means there’s no longer any need for taxpayers to annually pay more than $3.5 million in extra transportation costs to burden students on half- empty buses with 40-minute rides to and from school each day.
Curbing the demand for school buses would seem to be the only way to rein in transportation costs.