Dayton school administrators said they do not have the capacity to bus high school students while they are busing kindergarten through eighth grade students in DPS, private schools and charter schools all over the city.
State law requires public schools to bus all kindergarten through eighth grade students who live more than two miles from school. In an urban district like Dayton, which has dozens of schools scattered across the city, this can be complicated.
The measure was designed by Rep. Phil Plummer, R-Butler Twp., who is concerned with crime and loitering around downtown Dayton’s RTA hub and the impact that has on nearby businesses. He said he understands that Dayton Public could not immediately get buses and drivers, so he suggested a one-year runway.
“The kids are on buses too long,” Plummer said. “They’re waiting on an RTA bus, they’re waiting down there for a transfer with all the homeless people, the drug dealers. Who wants their 13 year old daughter standing around downtown waiting on a bus to go to school?”
The end goal, Plummer told the Dayton Daily News, was to get DPS high school students back on yellow school buses, not RTA buses. But, DPS could also appease his plan by finding an alternative transfer hub outside of downtown.
Plummer suspects his original proposal was quashed because it would have impacted all counties more populous than Montgomery. His new plan would be focused solely on Montgomery County.
Since April, Dayton school administrators have been holding conversations about school transportation with the RTA, members of the public, the Dayton Unit of the NAACP, the Montgomery County Educational Service Center, the city of Dayton and state lawmakers.
In April, a Dunbar High School senior, Alfred Hale III, died at the downtown bus hub on his way to school. Since then, there’s been a push to change how DPS students get to school, but the district says it’s not going to be able to change things for at least a year.
District officials have identified several problems to changing the current bus situation, including the number of students they are busing to charter and private schools, the amount of money the state reimburses local schools for transporting students, and a lack of buses that would take at least a year to get before they could be used.
Dayton Public schools superintendent David Lawrence said the proposal being taken out is good for the district, but it’s also good for the students that DPS serves. He said previously that DPS students use their school-provided bus passes to get to work, not just for school and home.
“We’re relieved,” the provision is gone, Lawrence said. “We’re in a climate in which it appears and seems there’s a lot of opposition to public schools.”
He said if the provision had not gone away, the district would have made plans to continue to fight it.
“We weren’t going to accept that,” he said.
Dayton Public has said previously it would cost about $11 million to purchase enough new buses to transport high school students. If they contracted with a third party, like First Student, that could also be cost prohibitive – DPS previously paid $17 million over three years to transport kindergarten through eighth grade charter and private school students, but the district and First Student dissolved the agreement in 2022 because of new rules from the state about delivery time.
