That school bus you see hauling kids down the road might look nice and yellow, but chances are good it’s old, costly and one of the reasons educators are making sacrifices in the education they provide.
Area school administrators participating in a Beacon Journal survey say it’s the result of state cuts in education subsidies.
Between 2002 and 2011, Ohio has expected its school districts to absorb $134.8 million in transportation costs. The result is that children are riding in older, less-efficient school buses.
The Beacon Journal survey shows more than 36 percent of the area’s school buses were built more than 12 years ago, and about 6 percent failed an inspection by the Ohio Highway Patrol last summer. Seventeen of the 61 districts in the five-county area that responded to the newspaper’s data request reported more than half of their buses were built in 1991 or before.
Seven of the bottom 10 districts in assessed property value per pupil had a majority of buses older than 12 years.
The oldest bus in the area was built in 1987. A bus that old can have 200,000 miles on the odometer.
“It’s a continuation of the shift from the state supporting public schools to having the local district bear the burden of everything, so it’s a shift to the local taxpayer,” said Alan Osler, superintendent of Tuslaw Schools.
He remembers a time about 10 years ago when the state paid about 50 percent of the cost of a new bus. That line item in the budget was cut to a few thousand dollars under former Gov. Ted Strickland and is zero under Gov. John Kasich’s proposed budget.
In 2002, the Ohio Supreme Court ended its oversight of the state’s education budget as part of a ruling that said the primary responsibility to pay for teaching kids was on the state, not local districts.
Not cheap
A new bus can cost $85,000 and is considered a capital expenditure, not an operating expense.
The state’s subsidies for running and maintaining buses would remain unchanged at $442 million in the Kasich budget proposal being considered by the General Assembly. That means public schools must absorb all inflation costs.
The state now offers nothing for the purchase of buses.
Between 2003 and 2011, state and local costs for transportation increased $225.1 million, or 31 percent. Over that time, the share borne by school districts increased 39 percent. Now those schools might see no increase in state help for the next two years.
Seeking new taxes
“We passed a levy in 2010,” Osler said. “You are trying to advance yourself, but with all the state cuts we’ve just been able to stay even.”
He said money that must go into buses is diverted from teaching kids.
“It does hurt education,” he said. “I would love to have that extra [money] that you have to put into a bus to be put into computers.”
The survey showed scores of area buses failed inspection last August. The school districts were quick to point out that inferior vehicles were not allowed on the road. Some were fixed for problems as simple as a burned out light bulb and used again. Many were simply held in reserve or sold and some were scavenged for parts.
“The age of the fleet ought to be illegal,” said Sen. Tom Sawyer, D-Akron, and ranking Democrat on the Senate’s education committee. “And in fact by virtue of the [education] department’s own recommendations it already surpasses in large measure the recommended replacement point for vehicles that are out there on the roads.”
Still mostly yellow
Bus 19 in Barberton is one of the oldest in the area. It has a little rust along the edges and some signs of wear but looks good for a vehicle built in 1989. That makes it older than the parents of some of the kids it transports.
Ryan Pendleton, Barberton schools treasurer and chief financial officer, said his system has a couple of advantages that allow it to keep buses longer: It covers only 10 square miles and the buses rarely have to go on major roads where they pick up corrosive salt. Bus 19 has only 115,000 miles and is used as a substitute.
Barberton has taken a number of steps to keep costs down. It means more kids are walking to school, and voters will face a levy in May. For about 10 years, Barberton has joined with Norton schools in a joint repair program.
And starting this year, it has gone to the state minimums for transportation. That means no rides for any kids in grades kindergarten through eighth who live within two miles of their school. High school students never got rides. Pendleton estimates that saved about $300,000 a year.
“That was difficult to do,” he said. “If we could bus every child, we would.”
Pendleton said the effect of the new busing policy on tardiness was minimal so far and the schools are watching attendance figures.
“Attendance is why we want to offer transportation to all students,” he said.
Busing would go back to the one-mile standard next year if a $3 million, 8.45 levy is approved by voters May 7. Similar issues have failed three times.
Shell games
Peter Japikse is an adviser for the Ohio School Board Association. He formerly worked for the Ohio Department of Education tracking transportation costs.
He said that about five years ago, around the time the state began drastically cutting back on bus-purchase subsidies, the average age of an Ohio school bus was about eight years. Last summer, it was 10.8 years.
“When things start to wear out, these districts don’t have enough money to replace them,” he said.
It’s the worst in Northeast Ohio where road crews apply brine to snow-covered roads and that salt eats away at fuel tanks, undercarriages and mufflers on the buses.
While delaying new purchases can help budgets in the short term, Japikse said it’s a false economy.
“The older a vehicle gets, the more it costs to keep it on the road,” he said.
He said a recent study showed that “once a vehicle has more than 200,000 miles, it’s no longer cost effective to keep it and you are actually better off replacing it.”
Because interest rates are low and many districts don’t have the capital budgets to purchase new ones, he is recommending some districts consider leasing.
“We have to get our buses replaced; buses are too old in this state,” he said.
The increasing popularity of charter and private schools is also increasing transportation costs.
Public schools are responsible for transporting students to private schools, even if they are not in their district. The result is longer routes and a greater likelihood that buses are inefficiently running at partial capacity.
For example, Japikse said the charter schools are not required to follow the same calendar as the public schools.
“If the non-public school starts a day earlier or goes a day longer, that puts the burden on the public school to go out and run around,” Japikse said. “That’s very expensive service because you have to bring in a driver, pay them extra money and haul kids around on a half-empty bus.”
Changing funding methods
About 10 years ago, the state had a formula to determine the costs of transportation in each district based on distances traveled, the number of students and other factors.
The goal was to fund about 60 percent of the transportation costs with state tax money. That formula was a result of that Supreme Court ruling on the state’s funding responsibility.
Full funding never happened, because legislators said they didn’t have enough money. Japikse said the formulas were adjusted to match the money the legislature wanted to pay.
At that time, transportation money was identified in the subsidies to schools and they could not use that money for anything else. Some of the money is still funneled into their pot of cash, but because it is not designated in their subsides, they can spend the money anyway they like.
“There’s a little bit of a shell game going on,” said Japikse, whose former job with the state was to look at the data and apply it to the formula.
“What they are getting right now is not based on a formula at all,” he said. “In essence, what happened was however much a district got the last time the formula was run, they continued to get 98 percent of that money but it was commingled with everything else.
“There are two problems with that. One was no one knew how much money they got for transportation because it all was commingled. The second part of the problem: If you are in a high growth district and buy more buses and haul more kids you are not getting more money because there is no formula. Conversely, if you are in a district that is reducing service and taking buses off the road you are going to get the same amount. So from a business standpoint and accounting standpoint you are not matching service and funding.”
Issue still pending
School funding for the state’s next two-year budget is far from settled.
State Sen. Frank LaRose, R-Copley, said that whether it is the state or the local school district paying for buses, “It’s all Ohioans that are paying for it.”
He said ultimately, he would prefer taxation be closer to home because “sometimes that money will be more carefully spent.”
But he also said he’s open to debating the school bus issue when the issues move from the Ohio to the Senate.
“I would be open to taking a close look at offering more money for transportation funding,” he said. “I don’t know how many of my colleagues are in that same place.”
Sawyer has proposed legislation to return to a formula to fully fund education but with a legislature dominated by Republicans he is uncertain if will be seriously considered. Meanwhile, he regrets seeing the funding burden moved to the local level.
“This is a very concrete example of the state’s support of public education being pushed down onto local taxpayers,” he said. “One district after another has talked to me about levies which are being in some cases in whole or in part devoted to meeting the cost of transportation.”
Dave Scott can be reached at 330-996-3577 or davescott@thebeaconjournal.com. Follow Scott on Twitter at Davescottofakro.