Bumpy Budget For CMS Bus Riders
The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education weaved through myriad twists and turns Tuesday night navigating its way through possible busing changes that might be lurking around the bend next year, as officials grapple with budget cuts projected to top $100 million.
A preliminary roadmap that district officials rolled out included proposals that could cut nearly $19 million in transportation costs and leave upwards of 51,000 students stranded without bus rides.
The students kicked to the curb under one proposal would, instead, find themselves hoofing it to school or scrambling for some other mode of transportation. That would be the case if CMS pursues an option to stop providing bus rides for students who live within 1.5 miles of their schools. The potential savings, officials say, could reach $5 million to $6 million.
Several board members, however, expressed concerns about the potential safety risks of making kids walk to school.
“It may be because of traffic; it may be because of some vicious dog in the neighborhood; it may be because of child molesters,” said board member Joe White. “The truth is there are some areas in this community that it isn’t safe for our children to walk.
“One of my criteria has always been would I require your child to do something that I wouldn’t require my five-year-old granddaughter to do,” White said. “And there are some areas out there that I wouldn’t have her walking in.”
Another proposal officials wheeled out would eliminate bus rides for about 12,000 magnet students, saving the district up to $9.5 million. Maybe.
The savings would vary depending on how many families chose to stick with magnet schools and find their own transportation, or switched to neighborhood schools so their kids could still catch a bus. If all 12,000 or so former magnet students ended up still riding buses, only to their home schools, the projected savings drop to $4.4 million.
Having schools adjust current bell schedules, changing their start and end times to allow for different bus patterns and schedules, could save up to $3 million, officials said.
Regardless of whether CMS pursues any of the preliminary cost-saving bus proposals, the district still could face a giant roadblock: a complicated and outdated state funding formula that, like a lot of state-related funding formulas, stiffs Mecklenburg County in favor of equity for more rural counties.
School districts are assigned funding determined by how much they spent on transportation the previous year, along with a budget rating based on the cost per student and the number of buses per 100 students. Those two factors are then multiplied and the result is adjusted, based on several criteria like the average distance that students live from school and the number of students per mile of roadway traveled, to level the playing field between different counties.
“If we didn’t do any adjusting, then the counties where kids live closest to school would have the higher budget rating because it’s easier for them to be efficient,” said Derek Graham, a section chief for transportation services with the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction.
“The goal is to equitably fund transportation for each of the 100 counties,” Graham said, “to treat each of those school districts the same and to fund to the level of efficient operations.”
The state funds about 82 percent of CMS’ nearly $59 million transportation budget. The state’s stringent funding formula, however, is often at odds with CMS goals to reduce costs and improve efficiencies. For example, any savings from CMS’ proposal to eliminate bus rides for kids living within 1.5 miles of their school would largely be wiped out by the state’s formula adjustments, said CMS Transportation Director Carol Stamper.
“This is one of those things that is maddening,” board member Trent Merchant said of the state’s funding formula. “Here we are comparing ourselves to rural counties with two high schools that ride 14 miles to school.”
Merchant wanted to know if, based on local school districts generating cost savings, there was any potential for the state to take make exceptions to what he called “a math formula completely devoid of judgment.”
Graham said that is not something the state has addressed.
In that light, board member Rhonda Lennon suggested that all board members begin lobbying state legislators, starting with incoming House Speaker Thom Tillis, who is from the same North Meck neck of the woods as Lennon, to consider changes to the state formula that would reward districts for implementing cost-saving measures.
It is, Merchant said, “downright intransigence and stubbornness and foolishness not to at least look at this.”
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