By Carol Chmelynski
06/01/04 -- In addition to all the other budget woes afflicting school districts across the country, add the skyrocketing price of gasoline.
With prices at the pump reaching a national average of more than $2, some districts are having to charge students for daily bus transportation or eliminate or increase the fees for field trips and after-school activities.
"I haven't heard from any state or region that has not been dramatically affected by the soaring gas prices. It seems to be having a blanket effect," says Mike Martin, executive director of the National Association for Pupil Transportation, headquartered in Albany, N.Y.
"The only ones whose impact have been tempered are those who buy gas on a futures market," he says, and "that's probably less than 10 percent of the market."
On any given day, yellow school buses transport 24 million students to and from school and an additional 5 to 7 million students on activity trips, Martin says.
With 450,000 to 475,000 school buses on the road every day, the nation's school bus fleet is bigger than its public transit industry, he says.
"Even a rise of one cent a gallon is huge," Martin says. "We're just getting hammered."
Zane Cole, director of transportation for Valparaiso (Ind.) Community School Corporation, says, "Right now we are financially OK, but it doesn't take too much when you go from paying $1 a gallon [for diesel fuel] to $1.50 a gallon before things get eaten up real quick."
Cole says his 6,000-student district has 60 buses that use about 2,500 gallons of diesel fuel every three to four weeks. "You're talking big bucks," says Cole, who purchases 9,000 gallons of gas at a time.
According to the U.S. Department of Energy, the average national price as of May 24 was $2.06 a gallon for regular unleaded gasoline and $1.76 a gallon for diesel fuel -- 36 cents more than it was a year ago.
California has the highest prices in the nation, with $2.26 per gallon for diesel.
Cole notes that schools are exempt from paying federal and state fuel taxes, but the average school bus only gets six to seven miles per gallon of gas.
The Tulsa, Okla., school district -- which operates 250 bus routes and uses about a million gallons of fuel a year -- is fortunate that it started taking measures several years ago to cut transportation costs.
The 41,000-student district reduced the number of bus stops from 900 to 300, which "saves between $750,000 to $1 million a year when you take all things into consideration," says Transportation Director Bob Haddox.
The district also spent about $1,000 a bus to install a computerized, global-positioning (GPS) system on each of its 305 buses, which enabled drivers to reduce route lengths and shave off a million miles a year.
The GPS units cost the district $300,000, but will result in savings of at least $500,000 every year, he says.
About three or four years ago, the district began to fully automate bus routing for all students, "focusing on special education, because that's most expensive," Haddox says.
Between 15 and 25 percent of special ed students don't ride buses each day because of illness, he says. "Now we have parents call in to a voice response system, which reroutes the buses every night. Consequently, we only go where we know the children will ride. That saves us 30,000 to 50,000 gallons of fuel -- or almost two month's worth of fuel -- just with our 65 special education buses."
The district uses technology to integrate the buses into a system in which administrators can monitor routes every day so they know exactly were the buses are, where they are going, and at what speed they are traveling. This helps to reduce accidents, as well as save on fuel, Haddox says.
The district is now paying $1.50 a gallon, and the average for this school year is $1.33, he says. But the district budgeted for $1.15 back when prices were only $1.01, he says, and "that helped us some."
"We're just squeezing by, by the skin of our teeth, with the recent gas increases, and only because some money was left in the budget from last year," Haddox says.
If the district had not made all the other changes, he notes, "We would have gone over our $712,000 budget this year pretty substantially -- by $112,000. All the things fell in our favor at the same time."
Larger districts buy their gas in bulk at discounted prices, but smaller districts refuel buses at the pump and are most affected by the soaring costs.
"It's hurting rural communities big time, simply because we don't have public bus transportation systems," says Cathie Lundegard, business director for the Plumas Unified School District in Quincy, Calif.
The 2,700-student district has 26 buses in its fleet covering a 45-mile radius. The buses refuel at the pump where Lundergard says gas is $2.60 a gallon.
"Because of tax exemptions, we pay about $2.25 a gallon, but some of our older buses only get four to five miles per gallon, which is just horrendous," she says.
"Because we're such a rural community off the beaten path and 80 miles from anywhere, we pay a premium for gas," Lundegard says. The district no longer has gas tanks of its own "because all the rules and regulations made it cost prohibitive."
Last year, Plumas buses logged 419,000 miles, she says, and "sometimes those big buses picked up only five kids."
The district budgeted $100,000 for transportation for the 2003-04 school year. "We haven't gone over our budget yet, because we've stopped using our school buses for field trips. Parents have taken over that responsibility," says Lundergard. That has saved the district about $20,000.
The district also is considering charging students for daily bus transportation next year. "We're thinking about $70 a semester, which would be less than a dollar a day, but we have to get our foot in the door some way," she says. "Even that will be a hard sell to local parents."
The district only provides bus service to elementary students who live more than one mile from school and to high school students who are more than two miles away.
The district has already lost a lot of students to home schooling, she says. "If you lose the transportation or if you charge too much, students go to home schooling or a distance learning charter school. It contributes to our declining enrollment."
Noting that about 5 percent of the district's budget goes to transportation, Lundergard says, "if you have to spend more on transportation, it means less for instructional supplies and books and nice things like new computer programs."
The most important thing districts can do to save fuel is to implement an anti-idling policy, Martin recommends. "Whenever you know you are going to be stopped for a certain amount of time, shut the engine off as opposed to idling the vehicle," he says.
Martin also advises district business officials to re-evaluate or restructure their fuel purchasing agreements.
And he also notes that school buses are just one component of a district's transportation fleet. Districts still have to operate lawn mowers, delivery trucks, and other vehicles.