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Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
Home > Blogs > Get on the Bus > Archives > 2008 > June > 26
Thursday, June 26, 2008
How important is high school busing?
On today’s opinion page, the DDN’s editorial board asks if the school board is doing enough to save high school busing.
The editorial notes that dropping the district’s RTA bus contract will have two big effects — it will almost certainly lower the district’s attendance and it will put thousands more kids downtown every day. A consequence of lower attendance could be a decline in academic achievement. Kids can’t learn if they aren’t in school.
The big question is whether the district can let that happen or if it can (or should) rework its budget to make high school busing a higher priority.
The editorial board argues that the consequences of dropping high school busing potentially are very serious and asks why there isn’t more urgency for the board to solve this problem. Some of the parties that came together last year to help — especially the city and the RTA — are not in a fiscal position to offer assistance this year. And they’ve been direct with the school board about that for a year.
But the school board’s financial woes are real. At the board’s finance committee meeting this week, finance officers were scrambling and scraping to hold the financial ship steady until the June 30 end of the fiscal year. And the district cut it very close this year, finishing the year with just a small surplus of cash.
Still, all budgets are built on priorities and a fair question has been asked by the DDN and by some readers here at GOTB — if busing really matters, how can the $2 million cost not find its way into the district’s $180 million budget for next year?
Is it really impossible to find something else that can be traded out for $2 million?
Let’s take sports, for example. The district has not announced any change to its athletics program, so if they follow last year’s plan there will be at least five varsity sports teams at the high school level. Now, the value of sports has been debated a lot here, but let’s give the benefit of the doubt and assume all the good things about sports are true — that they help kids build character and obtain useful life skills.
Even so, is that more important than getting kids to school so they can learn in the first place? I don’t have the figures in front of me, but wouldn’t the money for sports make a decent dent in the busing deficit?
Some time back, the district presented a potential plan to curb spending on the operational side by extending the rotations for some routine functions. For instance, the proposal suggested cutting grass every other week instead of weekly. That plan dissolved and has never been heard from again. Could the district adjust maintenance, custodial and groundskeeping routines to save money for busing?
The DDN editorial questions whether the district has really dug for money by reprioritizing in this way.
What do you think? Is high school busing important enough to make these moves? Or is it fair to ask the kids to find their own ways to school?
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