Rising transportation costs hurting schools

By Staff
Johnny Mack Morrow
Can anything be as hurtful to the family budget as the skyrocketing price of gas?
The upward cost has each one of us looking to cut down on our driving, figuring out how to combine trips, and trying to squeeze as much mileage out of our cars.
No one is immune to rising fuel costs, and our schools are some of the hardest hit. Think about it, getting kids to school is the single biggest transportation effort each day in our state.
Alabama schools move 370,000 children every day from their homes to their classrooms, traveling 440,000 miles to do so. There are more than 7,500 school buses traveling our roads each morning and afternoon.
It is a massive effort.
Each year, Alabama school buses drive almost 80 million miles, enough miles to drive around the world more than 3,000 times. Now plug in the spiraling cost of fuel, and you begin to see a very real problem for already strapped school systems, especially rural systems where distances are greater and local resources are fewer.
Money for student transportation is supplied by the state, earmarked in the education budget, and distributed on a per student basis to local school systems. The transportation budget was pegged for this past school year at over $340 million for the entire state. But this was before the energy price spike began.
Last year's budget estimated for gas at $3 a gallon. Now diesel fuel is up to $4.25, and it could go even higher. Some analysts are talking over $6 by the end of school next year. Such high prices are taking a toll on school budgets.
When the $3 a gallon price was set a year ago, diesel was below $2.50 and most analysts never dreamed that prices would increase so much.
In the last month of the school year, May prices for diesel started around $3.50 and were over $4 by the time school let out. Every local school transportation official breathed a sigh of relief when the final bell rang in this school year.
The high prices made schools spend millions more than was allocated, and there seems to be little relief in sight.
In the recent education budget, an extra $5 million was added to transportation to try and offset some costs, taken from other areas of the education budget.
But this is a drop in the bucket compared to the inflation of fuel and the growing need for transportation funds.
School systems are already looking to combine more routes and consolidate pick up points. It is not as if schools weren't already trying to do this; the average number of students per bus is 50 according to state transportation officials, a high capacity number.
The good news is almost all of Alabama's buses are less than ten years old and are very well maintained. And local school bus drivers are some of the best trained drivers in the country, holding commercial drivers licenses and a state certificate.
They know how to get the most out of their buses, and they run as efficiently as possible.
We have made great strides in our schools in the past couple of years. There are huge gains in student achievement, test scores are up, and graduation rates are at an all time high.
Now it seems the pump is draining precious resources from the budget, just as it is doing for all of us. We are going to have to be tough and smart in the way we deal with this problem. We've done it before, but this time it is as difficult as it has ever been.
Johnny Mack Morrow is a state representative for Franklin County. His column appears each Wednesday.