Fixing the route: Navigating transportation programs for school districts

It was always important to me to greet my students as they entered the classroom so they felt welcomed and seen. This ritual also allowed me to gauge their moods and readiness to learn, helping me adjust how I began class each morning.

As I researched school transportation for this column, I was reminded that for many of my students, I was not the first school-connected person they encountered each day. For many, it was their bus driver, and that morning ride often set the emotional tone they carried with them into the classroom.

Drivers told me that their riders carry with them a full range of emotions and situations — from those who have just had fights with their families on the way out the door, to those who are essentially raising themselves, to those dealing with depression or anxiety.  Drivers need to have the skills of a counselor, a teacher and a parent, utilizing them all while driving buses filled with students on rural roads in mud season and ice in winter.  While the bulk of this column will be about the economics of school transportation, I don’t want to lose sight of the human connection and education that happens on many of our buses, nor how crucial that environment is for many of our children.

A very, very brief history

Children attending the first one-room schools in Massachusetts got to school however and whenever they could. When school became compulsory in 1852, transportation became an issue; if the state was going to require attendance, it had to ensure children had a reliable way to get there. To meet this need, schools provided “kid hacks” or “school wagons,” which were horse-drawn wagons with wooden planks for seats.

When the movement to consolidate schools picked up speed, new motorized, steel-framed buses enabled the transition to happen, transporting larger numbers of children to the newly centralized, consolidated schools. 

School transportation today

Approximately 400,000 students take buses to school in Massachusetts each year, including around 62,000 students with special needs. Public schools are legally responsible for providing transportation for all public school students who live one-and-a-half to two miles or farther from school. Due to a law passed by state lawmakers in 1936, this mandate also extends to students attending charter, private and parochial institutions.

These costs add up quickly. In Boston, for example 1,177 Catholic school students received bus service or MBTA passes last year, which cost Boston Public Schools $1.9 million. Altogether, the city spent more than $2.3 million to transport private and parochial school students. Boston is far from the only municipality directing significant local dollars toward non-public school transit. Those dollars come out of the local district’s budget, with no state reimbursement.

Bus companies

A recent Massachusetts Office of the Inspector General (OIG) survey found that 67% of Massachusetts school districts received only one or zero bids for the transportation contract, and without any competition districts do not have much bargaining power. 

Costs

Districts pay an average of between $1,000 and $1,200 per year per student for general education students, and somewhere between $14,000 and $15,000 per year for each special education student. However, that price can become quite a bit higher for students who are transported out of district for their education.

When students have to be bused out of district for services their home district cannot provide, the local district has to pay for transportation to the facility providing the services and the cost of the tuition for those services. Greenfield budgets more than $2 million each year for sending students out of district. Mohawk Trail spends $700,000 to transport students out of district and another $1.7 million for tuition. While there is some reimbursement from the state — between 65% and 75% — that still leaves hundreds of thousands of dollars for districts to cover and that reimbursement does not come to districts until the following year, and districts can’t predict how much that reimbursement will be, which makes budgeting very challenging.

In 2022, the Rural Schools Commission found that per pupil costs were 17% higher in smaller districts, or districts with fewer than 1300 students, than in more populated districts. When the state encouraged rural distrng.icts to regionalize they promised to cover transportation costs, but they have failed to meet their commitment. They have rarely paid more than 75% of district transportation costs, leaving districts with significant debt.

Who drives

One of the challenges that districts face is having enough bus drivers to cover their routes.  Many school bus drivers are seniors and many decided to stop driving buses during the pandemic and chose not to come back. There are many other reasons as well.

Driving a school bus does not pay as well as many other driving jobs, such as working for Amazon or UPS. And because the job requires the split shifts — working only a few hours in the morning and a few in the afternoon — it does not provide a living wage.

There is a significant challenge to getting the Commercial Driver’s License. It requires up to 60 hours of training and passing a very challenging written test that most applicants fail more than once, at $30 a pop. It’s the same test that you need to pass in order to drive an 18-wheeler carrying hazardous materials and asks minutia about all the parts of the engine, which is a head scratcher since drivers are not allowed to perform any engine repairs.  

And drivers get virtually no training in dealing with children. Once they have passed their written and driving tests, they are turned loose to deal with a bus filled with children, and as I mentioned at the start of this column, that can be incredibly challenging. Many drivers come to realize that this is not the job for them.  

So what can we do?

People I spoke with identified steps we can take to make school transportation more efficient and affordable. First, given that state law mandates that children be educated in an environment that is best for them — a mandate that educators support — the state government should fully pay for those programs, services and transportation rather than saddle districts with these unsustainable costs and should pay those costs during the same year they are incurred.

Second, the state can streamline the commercial licensing process. The current system to secure a bus driver’s license is prohibitively expensive and unnecessarily complicated — particularly the written exams — making it difficult to recruit and retain enough operators.

Third, private bus companies should be required to provide itemized expense reports so that school districts know exactly what services they are paying for, which is not current market practice. Additionally, districts could find significant savings through localized regional collaboration and optimized route planning using advanced computer scheduling programs.

Finally, school superintendents and committees can make clear to legislators the true impact of not meeting their commitment to fully pay for transportation. Local leaders should also highlight the unfairness of the MBTA getting so much transportation support from the FAIR act while some districts don’t have any public transportation at all, limiting options to students who would like to be involved in after school activities, or to attend community college while still in high school.

School transportation is obviously an essential and vital part of public education, and while the state does an amazing job getting children to school, we can and must make it more affordable and efficient.

Doug Selwyn taught at K-12 public schools from 1985 until 2000 and then at university as a professor of education until he retired in 2017. He is the chair of the Franklin County Continuing the Political Revolution education task force. You can reach him at dougselwyn12@gmail.com.