GREENFIELD — Several months after the School Committee voted to spend $9,995 on a cost-efficiency study of the School Department’s self-operated busing system, the results are in — the district’s transportation is running efficiently.
The committee decided to conduct the study in October to determine whether it would be cheaper to contract a special education busing system outside of the district or retain the School Department’s existing self-operated system.
Richard Labrie, a consultant at Alliance Education Associates LLC who specializes in school transportation, recently presented results of the study.
Labrie explained that expenditure increases over the course of four years have been “modest” in comparison to neighboring districts.
“Whatever cost structure you want to look at for comparison, whether it’s Amherst or Mohawk or any of the others, it makes sense for you to continue to self-operate as much as you can as opposed to contracting out for it,” Labrie said. “Over the past four years, your transportation [cost] has increased a modest 5.88% [on average] and that’s a modest number compared to your district budget, which has averaged about a 6.26% increase over the same amount of time.”
When measuring the efficiency of a school district’s transportation, Labrie explained that he takes into consideration factors such as the geographic size of a district, the number of bus riders, the time spent picking up and dropping off students, and other key factors.
One of the more significant indicators of a district’s transportation efficiency, he added, is the time available between school start times, referred to as “transportation tier time.”
“Oftentimes, if you have a short bell schedule or a short tier time, you could pick up more students if you had more time, but time limits the number of students that you could pick up and the length of the routes,” Labrie explained. “[We also study] your distance traveled, your travel time, your population density, highway road infrastructure — especially in western Mass given winter conditions and, in some cases, mud season in the spring.”
Discussing the district’s special education transportation expenditures, Labrie explained that those have fluctuated minorly from 2021 to 2025. He said that the district, at the time the report was being conducted, was transporting 21 special needs and unhoused students to 14 outside placements.
Labrie also added that the district’s buses are at 61% capacity for special education students — a percentage that he said is “very high,” compared to the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education’s (DESE) benchmark that four or more students on a route is sufficient.
With regular transportation averaging 61.6% capacity, Labrie explained that while a slightly higher ratio would be ideal, the routes’ capacity ratio is “relatively efficient.”
“You’re using 61.6% of the seats that are available on your regular transportation. Usually, you would like that to be at about the 70% range,” Labrie said. “You want some excess capacity on your routes. … With regard to the regular transportation routes, typically for a district of this size and with these demographics, a student capacity ratio of 61.6% is considered relatively efficient.”
Labrie compared the Greenfield School Department’s average of $235.80 cost per bus per day for special education transportation with the Mohawk Trail Regional School District’s $446.15 per bus per day and Amherst’s $250 per bus per day.
Mentioning that the district’s transportation uses anywhere from 75% to 82% of the time that it has available to students — a percentage of time that he referred to as a “high factor” — Labrie said the district’s time constraints played a role in its overall efficiency.
“Considering the current bell schedules and the available tier time, that has the greatest effect on your ridership. One important thing is that you’re using between 75% and 82% of the total time available to transport students, so it’s not like you have any extra time,” Labrie said. “When we allocate five minutes for drop-offs at the schools and sometimes it takes a little longer to load kids in the afternoon … that’s a very high factor with regard to looking at the efficiency of what you’re doing.”
When School Committee Chair Stacey Sexton asked Labrie how cost-effective electric buses would be in comparison to their diesel counterparts, he responded that using electric vehicles would not be a cost-effective solution without significant state or federal aid.
“The cost of an electric bus is two and a half times the cost of a diesel bus. The only way it makes sense for a municipality or a school district to get into electric buses is with state and federal aid,” he said. “The battery life on the buses are warrantied for seven to eight years, though the body may last 10 years and batteries have to be disposed of as hazardous waste. Replacing the battery pack on a school bus is almost half the cost of the bus.”