The Nexus

Tim Chu
Students arrive at school by bus on Dec. 17. PUSD decreased the number of school buses by 20 this year in order to save funds.

At the beginning of the school year, PUSD took 20 school buses off the road, cutting transportation for 1,500 students, in hopes of saving the district money that might be needed in other areas.

Currently, the local bus total is 688 whereas ten years ago 1,148 regular education school buses were driving students to school.

According to the National School Transportation Association, these cuts have left California as the last state in the nation with the most students being driven to school in buses at public expense. Fourteen percent of California’s 6.3 million public school students take the bus, compared with 55 percent of students around the country.

Unlike special-education busing which is mandated by the State of California, many school districts around San Diego have decided that maintaining this number of regular education school buses is too costly in this economy. Steve Rogers, PUSD’s assistant director of transportation, said that cutting 20 buses in PUSD will save the district a total of $800,000.

“It takes about 100 students each paying the current $399 annual bus pass fee to cover the cost to operate one school bus,” Rogers said. “Because we [the district] eliminated elementary busing at all but a handful of sites, most school buses reach this figure of 100 students by serving a high school and middle school each day,” Rogers said.

When cutting bus stops, the district looks at whether a neighborhood is generating more than 50 students or not. If they cannot be combined with stops from other surrounding neighborhoods, then the stop will be cut.

The district, in making the students pay $399 for a yearlong bus pass, receives $1.4 million in fees and about the same level in reimbursement from the State of California. Poway Unified is able to offer the current reduced level of 39 regular education bus routes to approximately 4,000 students.

However, cutting bus routemeans more cars on the road and more smog in the sky. According to the American School Bus Council, it takes 36 cars to replace one school bus.

Nationally, students riding the bus save nearly $11.5 billion in automotive fuel costs annually. These costs would be passed on to the students.

Despite the need to save the district money, some research shows that about nearly as much money will be spent by parents driving their kids to school or students riding the bus.

According to a fuel calculator on the American School Bus Association’s website to figure the cost savings to a community, riding buses saves about $888,000 in fuel costs annually. After deducting the cost of fuel for the buses, the overall fuel cost saving to the community will be around $753,341.

With multiple districts around San Diego County cutting buses, some parents in other neighborhoods have begun paying the full cost of the bus, especially if they work full-time or cannot find another student to carpool to school with.

In San Diego Unified School District at Marshall Middle School, parents are paying $550 each for a private busing company.

This $550 is cheaper than parents paying the cost to and from school themselves.

The National School Bus Council states that it costs the parents of the students $663 to make a round trip to and from school.

The district said that cutting these bus stops was the one of the best ways to save the district enough money without cutting programs.

“We [the district] strongly believe that a school bus is the safest form of transportation for students to and from school, so we are not happy to see so many students lose access to the school bus,” Rogers said.

“But if we had not made these painful cuts, there was a strong likelihood that we would have lost the entire regular education busing program.”

With California still facing a budget deficit of possibly $27.8 billion within the next 20 months, California districts including PUSD will be looking again to shave even more bus routes from around the state.