VERNON TOWNSHIP — The state’s outdated system for funding school transportation forces rural districts like many of those in northwestern Pennsylvania to shoulder a heavy burden, officials from the region told a state Senate subcommittee Monday.
Representatives from several northwestern districts and bus companies painted a dark and depressing picture of school transportation at a hearing held in the Crawford Central Instructional Support Center. The picture they painted was literally dark: they described students braving wintry conditions while trudging as much as 1.5 miles to rural bus stops for pickup times as early as 6 a.m., then spending 90 minutes on the bus in some cases — only to repeat the process all over again in the afternoon.
“The challenges to rural districts are far greater than to our urban counterparts,” Conneaut School Board President Jody Sperry said in testimony presented to the Appropriations Subcommittee on Education, Workforce, Community and Economic Development. “With the possibility of the property tax elimination, we struggle to know where we will find the dollars to continue.”
The subcommittee, which included Republican state Sen. Michele Brooks of Crawford County, listened again and again to school officials who feel squeezed by the large geography of rural districts and a state funding formula that encourages districts to put as many students on a bus as possible. To get more students on a bus, districts must design longer routes, which mean longer bus times.
Conneaut, for example, is spread over 319 square miles with a population density of 2.1 students per square mile, according to Doug Anderson, owner of Anderson Coach and Travel, which provides bus services for the district.
“We run out of time before we run out of seats,” Anderson told the legislators.
For the time being, Sperry said, the longest any Conneaut student spends on the bus is 75 minutes for a one-way trip, but that could be going up as the district begins to consider middle school consolidation.
“(Students) could possibly be on the bus for two hours (each way) if we need to control our transportation costs,” Sperry testified.
Conditions are nearly that bad already in Warren County, the state’s second largest district by area at 788 square miles. Students ride buses for up to 90 minutes in some cases.
Furthermore, said Superintendent Amy Stewart, buses carry students of all grade levels rather than make multiple trips on the same routes. As a result, some of the students riding the bus for three hours each day are first and second graders.
All districts face common challenges when it comes to transportation, according to the testimony presented Monday. Extensive training requirements limit the pool of bus drivers. Districts are mandated to provide transportation to nonpublic schools, even days when the district’s own schools are not in session — and even to schools as much as 10 miles outside the district’s boundaries. State regulations also require districts to transport homeless students to their “home” districts, regardless of where the students may be located at present.
Rural districts also face challenges unique to their locations.
Stewart pointed out, for instance, that Warren County School District transports 82 Amish students to eight different preschools. Further complicating the task, she said, is the fact that the Amish do not follow daylight savings time, forcing the district to accommodate multiple student schedules.
Local bus companies told the senators that the state method for reimbursing school district transportation costs, which was formulated in 1972, doesn’t account for costs and conditions that have developed in the intervening decades.
Increasing costs for fuel, insurance and even school bus parts should be reflected by updating the reimbursement formula, according to Fred Bennett, president of the Pennsylvania School Bus Association. Perhaps most importantly, the formula should recognize the high cost of transporting children with special needs, particularly in geographically large rural districts where it is difficult to maximize the number of students in any given vehicle.
The goal of the reimbursement formula when it was designed 45 years ago, according to Sen. Patrick Browne, was for districts to end up spending about 0.5 mills of property taxes on transportation.
Conneaut’s current contribution to transportation costs are equivalent to more than four mills of taxes, while Warren County’s are about five mills, according to data presented at the hearing.
