As a bus driver shortage continues to affect the country, Ohio is considering changes to its school transportation system.
A state working group recently sent recommendations for change to the state legislature. Not everybody's happy about their report.
Member station Ideastream Public Media's education reporter, Connor Morris joined The Ohio Newsroom to discuss.
On the make-up of the working group
“This is a group of elected officials, representatives in public schools, private schools and charter schools. They were called into action in the last biennial budget bill, and they were tasked with investigating a bunch of issues with the state system for getting students to school.”
On the issues the working group investigated
“The big [issue] that folks would know about is the ongoing bus driver shortage that’s making it harder for schools to staff routes. But under the hood, so to speak, there's a lot going on. Since the 1970s, public schools have had to transport all students that live in their boundaries, including private and charter schools — and those options have expanded a ton since that time. So there's been a much bigger burden on [public] schools recently.
“One of the big ways that public schools can get around [the bigger transportation load] is what’s called ‘payments in lieu of.’ So that’s paying parents instead of transporting their kids. That costs about $1,200 per school year per student. But the working group says that's just not enough for families to obtain adequate transportation. And there's about 22,000 kids in Ohio that are getting those ‘payments in lieu of’ each year. One of the recommendations from the group is to start to phase that out, actually.”
On the history of public schools transporting private school students
“Generally, public school advocates are concerned about this and say it shouldn't be their responsibility. The state says, meanwhile, ‘We want all kids to be safe and get to school on time.’ And the state said it's also reimbursing schools for all this transportation they're doing. But school advocates — and also this working group — said, ‘Actually we're really not reimbursing schools enough.’”
On the working group’s recommendations
“One of the chief recommendations was to increase funding for schools in general to provide transportation services. There's a couple of longer-term fixes: it looks like the legislature might be interested in utilizing these education service centers – which are these sort of government agencies that provide services to all schools in these larger regions – to create a regional transportation hub so they're sharing costs and things like that. Eventually, they're suggesting eliminating those ‘payments in lieu of,’ and just in general increasing funding. They've also talked a bit about increasing support for bus driver training and changing up some of the licensure requirements to make it a little easier to [increase the number of] bus drivers.”
On disagreement among the working group
“Three group members did not want to attach their names to it, essentially. A member of the transportation work group, Bob Hlasko of the Medina County Education Services Center, said more funding for schools to transport students is the biggest issue:
“Schools have a finite budget,” Hlasko said. “They don't have money to add bus routes, to add drivers, to do those things typically, and at the end of the day they're getting funded by the state at 48% of what the state says it costs to transport a student.”
“There's also some concern about representation on the working group,” Morris continued, “which didn't have any direct bus drivers or representation from that industry on it. And they said that no matter what, you're still gonna have this bus driver shortage if you don't increase pay.”
On what’s next
“Senator Andrew Brenner, a Republican who's on the working group, told Cleveland.com that he's interested in adding some of these recommendations to some education reform-related bills in the coming months, especially around regionalizing transportation, which would take the onus away from individual schools to provide transportation for charters and privates. And he also talked about figuring out a way to kind of align schedules among private and charter schools.”