An icon of education, the yellow school bus, is emerging as a casualty of budget crises in states and school districts across the nation.
Cash-strapped districts throughout California are likely to eliminate bus service to neighborhood schools next year, and several states and districts, including some in Illinois, are taking similar steps to cut school bus routes.
Ana Rebollo and Blanca Fitz, standing with their elementary school-age daughters at a corner bus stop in Encinitas, north of San Diego, wondered just how their children and others in the neighborhood will get to and from school next year, when the school bus no longer is an option.
Rebollo’s husband takes the lone family car to work long before the children go to school. Fitz, a single mother, is at work when her daughter leaves school. It is too far, and too dangerous, in their view, for the girls to walk to school, down a long busy street without a sidewalk.
“I don’t know what we’ll do,” Rebollo said in Spanish as she and more than two dozen children waited for the bus.
The problem is nationwide: In Massachusetts and Texas, districts are considering increasing, or establishing for the first time, school-bus fees that may run as high as several hundred dollars per year. In school districts in Alaska, Minnesota and Tennessee, among other states, schools are redrawing school bus routes in ways that extend walking distances and reduce the number of children who will be eligible to ride the bus.
At a time when school districts are trying to find ways to pare budgets, school transportation, often a large budget line item, is increasingly vulnerable.
In Illinois, where hundreds of school districts are struggling with budget deficits, there has not been a push to totally eliminate bus service. But local officials are scaling back on transportation services, state officials said.
Carpentersville School District 300, for example, eliminated transportation for students who live within 1.5 miles of school. Park Ridge School District 64 cut one of its 15 bus routes. Lyons Township Elementary District 103 slashed transportation services for 100 of the 600 students who had been riding the bus.
“Right now, with budgets the way they are, you have to develop priorities,” said District 103 Supt. Michael Mercer. “You’ve got to ask yourself, `Do we teach them reading and math, or do we bus them to school?'”
The cuts have forced parents to become inventive. Mary Staley, whose 3rd-grade son attends Lester Elementary School in Downers Grove, started her own student chauffeur service after the district wiped out bus service for the school. Now, she carts seven children to and from school each day in her Dodge Caravan.
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“I wasn’t about to let my son cross busy streets by himself, and I knew a lot of other parents who felt the same way,” said Staley. “Sometimes, you have to take matters into your own hands.”
Robin Leeds, regulatory liaison with the National School Transportation Association, a trade group for school bus contractors, noted that districts face tough choices between cutting bus service or trimming books, teachers, art or other programs. “In those cases, transportation seems like a luxury that can be eliminated,” she said. “Unfortunately, there’s a major safety concern that happens. It’s not just a matter of convenience.”
She and other school transportation experts said the result of reduced bus service in parts of the country will almost certainly be the deaths of more children.
Three years ago, the Transportation Research Board of the National Academy of Sciences found in a study that the school bus is by far the safest way for a child to travel to and from school. Each year over the previous decade, the study found, approximately 800 school-age children died and another 152,000 children were injured in traffic accidents that took place during normal school travel hours. School buses were involved in 2 percent of the fatal accidents and 4 percent of the injury accidents–less than any other form of transportation. The most dangerous situation, accounting for 55 percent of fatal accidents, occurred with teenagers driving to school.
“By eliminating school bus transportation, I truly believe that you are condemning a certain number of children to die on the way to and from school each year,” said Doug Snyder, transportation director of the Kern County public school system in Bakersfield and past president of the California Association of School Transportation Officials.
In addition, school officials fear that without bus service, more children will be late to school and daily attendance rates may fall, while traffic, worsening in suburban and urban areas almost universally, will only get worse.
The trend is most pronounced in California, which is experiencing the largest budget deficit of all the states. Though about half of schoolchildren nationwide ride school buses daily, in California, the figure has fallen to 14 percent, and experts expect it to fall again next year.
The reliance on school buses varies widely from one district to another nationwide, and it can be invaluable in rural areas. Services are most vulnerable in the estimated dozen states that do not mandate home school bus service, according to the National School Transportation Association. But even in other states, Illinois included, fees, reduced bus routes and the like are reducing services. The federal government mandates school transportation service for only one group of students, those with “special needs,” which includes handicapped students.
Chicago Public Schools has been cutting busing and changing routing practices in recent years to save money. Its $95.8 million in bus costs this year is almost $2 million less than two years ago, according to Woody Fitzmaurice, general manager of the Bureau of Student Transportation.
The changes, including a cut in the number of stops and restrictions on which magnet school students get to ride, saved about $8 million between the 2000-01 and 2001-02 school years. Increased costs this year, however, including price increases in the bus contracts and growth in special education, absorbed some of the savings.
Many experts said they believed the California situation to be extreme, and, they hoped, unique. But, Snyder said: “Generally what happens in California tends to happen in the rest of the nation. If California is accepting [the elimination of school bus transportation], then other places could say, `Well, it worked out there.'”
In an effort to help pay for school transportation, some districts in Colorado and California have allowed advertising on the outside or inside of buses.
“Most of us feel that there should be no advertising on the exterior of the school bus,” said Ted Tull, a retired state trooper and the administrative director of the National Association of State Directors of Pupil Transportation Services. “I feel someone is going to be reading that advertising instead of looking for the kids.”
Tull said he is now seeing more school bus cuts being proposed than at any other time in his 17-year career.
He said the nation’s car culture plays a role, as do misperceptions about the safety of riding the school bus.
“If you go to any high school, you see bigger parking lots,” Tull said. “In many instances, mothers think, `I won’t put them on a school bus, I will drive them to school because it’s safer.'”