Is Education Reform Worth the Demise of Neighborhood Schools?
Some worry the benefits of a better education don’t outweigh the new problems it brings.
A couple of years ago, an Arkansas legislator named Reginald Murdock began paying attention to the school buses that plied the highways around his state. Some of them seemed to be on the road for a disturbingly long time, subjecting their student riders to extended periods each day when they couldn’t do much except sit.
Murdock introduced a bill that called for a study of just how much time Arkansas kids were spending on buses. The results came back last summer, and they startled a lot of people. The median-length trip to public school -- one-way -- was 47 minutes. The average pupil was on board for more than an hour and a half in the course of a normal day. At the outer edge of the survey, there were children who recorded daily bus travel times of 5 hours and 34 minutes round-trip. The problem existed not only in remote rural counties but also in the urbanized area around Little Rock, where kids were riding long distances to magnet schools. Solving it would require money for extra buses and additional drivers that the state educational system had shown no willingness to provide.
Most of us think of pupil busing -- when we think of it at all -- as a desegregation issue from the 1970s and 1980s that has largely receded into the background. But in the current century, busing has generated serious new concerns that school officials are largely powerless to defuse. One of them is travel time. Another one is cost.
In 2011, families in Indiana’s Franklin Township sued their local government because it had stopped providing students with free bus transportation back and forth to school. The township said its budget, battered by spending cutbacks in the aftermath of the Great Recession, couldn’t handle the expense. A Superior Court judge sided with the township, but an appeals court reversed the verdict and the matter is now before the Indiana Supreme Court.
The township has gone back to providing the service, under direction from the state legislature, and the plaintiffs have opted to home-school their children, but the dispute remains alive. Meanwhile, the National Center for Education Statistics has reported that in 2008-2009, the last school year for which data are available, it cost $871 on average for a school district to offer free bus service for one student for one year. For a sprawling district covering far-flung communities, that can amount to millions of dollars.
Several districts around the country find themselves in a predicament similar to the one in Franklin Township. At least 12 states allow school systems to make up budget shortfalls by charging for pupil transportation. The public schools in Colorado’s Is Education Reform Worth the Demise of Neighborhood Schools?: