School Bus Transportation News at STN Media

States’ Nationwide Fight for Funding

For Kirk Hunter, the future of pupil transportation in California looks bleak.

“A transportation crisis is about to happen,” said the CEO of Southwest Transportation Agency, a joint powers authority in the rural town of Caruthers, outside of Fresno, Calif.

Hunter blames the state’s funding system.

In a state where only 14 percent of students ride the school bus, school transportation funding doesn’t gain much attention, especially after 10 turbulent fiscal years. While general K-12 funding has grown by 140 percent in the last 20 years, pupil transportation funding has grown by just 40 percent. In the 1970s, before the state capped property taxes, pupil transportation was funded at 100 percent. Today, California funds around 45 cents on the dollar. Since the early 1990s, funding has increased only with inflation and cost of living. As gas prices soar and state demographics shift, rural districts are some of the hardest hit.

Urban and suburban school districts can cope with rising pupil transportation costs and sinking funding by increasing walking distances, using public transportation systems or charging parents. But in rural communities, students often live miles from their schools, there is little or no public transportation and, where as much as 90 percent of students receive free lunch, charging to ride the bus is not an option.

“If you had a dog, and it was this sick, you’d put it to sleep,” Hunter said.
To understand the challenges of creating and managing a funding system, School Transportation News looked at three states utilizing successful funding means.

Per Unit Allocation
Hundreds of miles up the Pacific Coast in Washington state, pupil transportation fares better. Here, about 48 percent of the state’s one million students ride the school bus, more than triple the rate of California. While this is still less than the national average of 53 percent, Washington displays an uncommon commitment to pupil transportation.
Unlike California, the Washington State Legislature is constitutionally required to fund 100 percent of home-to-school transportation as part of its obligation to provide K-12 education.

Still, despite having a strong constitutional mandate for pupil transportation, a recent audit by Management Partnership Services, Inc., found districts were underfunded by $100 million annually.

Allan J. Jones, the state’s director of pupil transportation, says under funding stems from limitations in the per-unit funding formula. Washington uses the number of students picked up at each radius mile from the school, the distance between stops and the number of stops each day to create a “weighted student” number for each route type. This is then multiplied by a predetermined per-student funding level.

But because the formula uses radius miles rather than road miles, a route that requires crossing a river or going over mountains would not be compensated as well as a route that goes over flat land. Further compounding problems, formulas are based on calculations made during the first week of school, before ridership has solidified and before transportation directors have established best routing practices.

But this year, the Washington State Legislature took steps toward improving funding. Both the state house and senate approved $165,000 in initial funding and $115,000 in subsequent funding to hire a consultant to help develop a new formula, one Jones says he hopes will correct some of the previous inequities by calculating funding per road mile.

The senate has already approved $12.5 million in additional funding for districts that were underfunded the prior year. While this is only 12 percent of what they were owed, Jones is optimistic about the direction of pupil transportation funding.

“We have a good chance, but it is only because our state’s constitution is dedicated to educational responsibility,” he added.

Approved Cost
Across the country in Delaware, State Director Ron Love attributes the state’s success to careful data collection and a similar legislative dedication to school transportation.

The formula Love uses to calculate how he will reimburse districts for the $81.6 million cost of 1,700 buses in daily operation seems daunting. There are different calculations for contractor-run and district-run operations, as well as variations for districts above and below the Delaware canal, and considerations for everything from fuel consumption to bus salvage costs to volume purchasing benefits.

Delaware uses an “Approved Cost” funding formula, meaning the state reimburses a percentage of the cost of specific items. Six other states (Idaho, Illinois, Missouri, Oregon, West Virginia and Wyoming) use similar formulas. While the formula can require considerable data collection, the fact that nearly 89 percent of Delaware’s students rode the bus daily last year shows just how well this calculus pays off.
For Love, the Internet has made it easier, too. Instead of working with 12,000 forms, he can point districts to a Web site where all they have to enter is their fuel consumption, fleet information and mileage. Information from the previous year can even roll over to save districts time. At the start of each year, districts will get half of their total funding from the previous year for start-up expenses.

By carefully collecting data, Love ensures that a reliable stream of funding gets to schools each year. Recently, he’s been able to help districts get even more money, creating a comprehensive system for bus replacement, adding allowances for bus aides, improving the bid price that the state uses for reimbursement and including the flexibility to compensate for fluctuating gas prices.

Efficiency Formula
In Utah, where as little as 32 percent of students ride the bus, pupil transportation director Murrell Martin was able to increase home-to-school funding to 82 percent this year. Last year, the system required a $5 million bailout just to get to 72 percent funding and historically funding as low as 60 percent.

Transportation is part of the minimum schools program, and the law requires the legislature provide funding for transportation, though it does not specify at what rate. Utah uses costs per mile and costs per minute to create a funding formula that aims to reimburse districts with slightly less than their actual costs. This, Martin says, encourages districts to be efficient.

In a system similar to that of Delaware, Utah’s 40 districts report their critical data on a predefined spreadsheet. Martin and his team of two, in conjunction with the state department of school finance and statistics, performs an audit to look for drastic changes and other glaring errors.

Martin uses this data to better understand the needs of all of his districts and adapt funding accordingly. In the last year, Martin has made some changes to make the system even easier to understand and even more accurate. He’s moved created a removed bus replacement and administrative costs from the operational costs category.

By collecting and analyzing data from all of the districts, Martin says he can create accurate state averages against which districts can compare themselves, encouraging districts to share information and be as efficient as possible. Collecting this also provides a unified voice for the state legislature to listen to.

“Making it understandable benefits everyone,” Martin says. “The last thing we want to do is transport fewer kids.”