BUSING BIND
CHANGE IN LAW FORCES FAIRFAX TO SHIFT GEARS
BY MICHELLE MONROE
ST. ALBANS MESSENGER STAFF WRITER
This article appeared in the Thursday Edition of The St. Albans Messenger dated November 6, 2014
FAIRFAX – Following a July 1, 2014, change in Vermont law, school districts no longer have the authority to provide transportation for their students. That responsibility now belongs to the supervisory unions, which are now also responsible for the costs.
Unlike most other schools in the area, Bellows Free Academy Fairfax (BFA) owns its buses and continues to provide service to its own students. With the new law, Franklin West Supervisory Union (FWSU) will have to put busing services for BFA out to bid, but superintendent Ned Kirsch said that does not automatically mean
BFA will sell its buses.
"We have to solicit bids and determine if the bids are more effective and efficient," said Kirsch.
If contracting with a bus service will be more costly than operating its own buses, BFA will continue to operate them, explained Kirsch. "We don't want to spend more money;" he said.
The decision of how to provide busing for BFA Fairfax students next year will be made by the FWSU board and not the Fairfax School Board, which no longer has the authority to make that decision under the law.
"The main hope here is that if you look at the situation supervisory union-wide then there ought to be cases where savings are available," said Vaughn Altemus, of the Vermont Agency of Education.
Before it changed the law, the Vermont Legislature heard testimony about partially full buses traveling through a community from a neighboring district to reach a union high school, Altemus said. With services provided by the supervisory union, those buses could be filled, he suggested.
Sharing busing across the supervisory union could offer some opportunities for more efficient busing, such as in areas of Fletcher and Fairfax where it might make more sense to have students from both communities share a bus rather than run two separate buses to neighboring areas, according to Kirsch. "There might be some efficiencies, but I don't know what they might be," he said.
Supervisory unions can contract with districts that own their own buses to provide busing services, explained Vaughn.
Some schools have sold their fleets to busing companies as part of a contract for services. According to minutes of a September Fairfax board meeting, BFA's fleet is worth $97,000 excluding the new bus purchased this year.
The cost of busing will be transferred to the supervisory union budget. Each school district pays a share of the supervisory union budget. However, voters do not vote directly on the budget, only the share of it appearing in their local school district budget.
Critics of transferring costs to supervisory unions have argued there is less transparency with supervisory union budgets because they are not directly approved by voters.
For this year, BFA has a waiver allowing it to provide busing for its students.
In order to continue to maintain its waiver, BFA would have to demonstrate to the Secretary of Education that continuing to provide services at the district level is more efficient and effective than providing busing on a supervisory union level, explained Altemus.
The intent of Acts 153 and 156 is to generate savings by requiring schools to provide transportation and special education as a group through their supervisory union rather than as individual school districts.
