Winter in the Piedmont region of North Carolina presents challenges for school transportation officials, especially in Guilford County. The county is on the dividing line of many weather systems, so it’s hard to predict whether it will snow, sleet, or rain. Trying to decide whether the roads are safe to transport students to school is a difficult call.
But this year, there have been many more difficult transportation decisions for Guilford County Schools. GCS has 26 magnet schools spread around the 650-square-mile county, and while there may be little doubt that magnet schools benefit students, GCS is feeling the pinch as it deals with disproportionate increases in transportation costs for magnet programs.
At the start of the 2004-05 school year, GCS came under fire from parents and the local media when its newly instituted hub system, designed to transport students more efficiently, didn’t work out as planned. Students didn’t know which buses to board, many went to the wrong schools, and many didn’t arrive home until late in the evening.
“My daughter was somewhere in Greensboro, and I didn’t know where,” one parent told the Guilford County Board of Education at a meeting addressing the problem.
Superintendent Terry Grier and the board once again found themselves on the hot seat, months after drafting a “school choice” plan for three High Point-area high schools that drew the ire of parents. The movement to oust Grier (“Get Terry Grier Outta Here!” was the rallying cry) and certain board members only intensified.
So huge was the outcry that the school board meeting addressing the problem had to be held in the county courthouse to accommodate the turnout.
At that meeting GCS Assistant Superintendent John Wright laid out several factors contributing to transportation problems:
• Transportation forms were turned into the wrong place, including 600 applications that weren’t received until the first day of school;
• Staff failure to enter names and transportation requests into the system;
• Lack of understanding of the transportation system and inadequate staff to handle the overwhelming number of phone calls and e-mails during the first few days of school.
Then Wright got to the heart of the matter: Guilford’s a pretty big county to have so many magnet schools. Getting a kid from Gibsonville, in the eastern part of the county, to Penn-Griffin magnet school, in the southwestern part of the county, is simply going to take a while, he said.
“How large a magnet zone will you allow and still expect timely transportation?” Wright asked the board. “If you don’t restrict the magnet zones, you’re going to have one-and-a-half-hour bus rides. You need to have some discussions about what you’re willing to do and what you’re willing to pay to do it.”
Of course, one option would be to disband the hub system, but at a cost $3 million to buy the buses to do so.
Board member Anita Sharpe presented another perspective. “The problem is greater than transportation,” Sharpe said. “This board needs to figure out if it can afford magnet schools.”
With that in mind, GCS has already begun discussions with the school board about how it will avoid the fiasco that greeted the start of school this year.
“We’ve got a long list of lessons from last fall,” transportation Director Jim Moen said.
Since 1995, GCS has provided what has been called “a reasonable effort basis to transport magnet students.” That reasonable effort basis, in the past, has been defined as “creating bus stops for magnet students, period,” Moen said.
It helps to realize that, magnet- and school-choice programs aside, there are annual start-up challenges for transportation staff, such as fluctuating ridership, late school registration, and requests for route changes on the first day of school.
Moen recently presented the Board of Education with costs related to transportation to magnet schools. Costs will indeed increase; 2003-2004 transportation costs for magnet students was $3.3 million, compared to $1 million if every student attended school in their home district.
Moen estimates a cost of $5.7 million for the 2005-06 school year, including $1.7 million for acquisition of new buses to accommodate the 700 more students projected to be riding buses.
The hub system will remain in place, but GCS will draw a line that would divide the county into east-west zones, with students being required to attend the magnet school within that zone. Length of bus rides will still be an issue, however, as Moen recommended extending the ride times to some schools from 65 minutes to 90 minutes for students attending programs in the High Point choice plan.
That recommendation concerned some school board members.
“To put that up to 90 minutes one way is going back on our word,” said board member Kris Cooke. “I think what that’s doing to that plan is not right.”
“Give me a scenario where it would take someone in that area 90 minutes to get to school,” said board member Susan Mendenhall.
Moen said it can’t be helped when there are two or three students in the northwest corner of the county attending magnet programs in High Point. “There are areas along the Forsyth County line where the roads require some difficult routing,” Moen said.
Other school systems have already taken steps to make transportation to magnet schools more efficient.
Wake County, which has magnet programs in 47 schools, has what it calls “express transportation,” which is similar to Guilford County’s hub system. Students provide their own transportation to a designated stop, which may be another school campus, a regional library, etc., and then the student is transported to his or her magnet school.
As for the cost of transporting students to magnet schools, Eddy Adams, transportation operations director for Wake County Schools, said he has been in his position only a short time and has not had an opportunity to evaluate costs of magnet transportation.
Adams is not overly concerned with the cost, saying in an e-mail message he did not “see where the cost would be exorbitant since we would have to be transporting those students anyway.”
In Charlotte-Mecklenburg, where 54 schools offer 15 magnet programs, students may apply to any magnet school within the district but transportation will only be provided if the school is within the student’s high school feeder area. The system has 14 high school feeder areas.
It should be noted that other factors besides magnet programs put the squeeze on transportation programs in Guilford County and elsewhere.
The federal No Child Left Behind law allows students to “opt out” of schools that don’t make annual academic progress, and school systems are struggling with how far they can transport students who choose to opt out.
Last year, GCS made transportation arrangements for 228 students who made that choice. However, school systems weren’t informed which schools didn’t make annual yearly progress until early August last year, making it “virtually impossible to anticipate the NCLB opt-out choices,” Moen said.
Another problem is transporting students to day-care centers. Moen said that half the problems he personally had encountered this past year had been delivering students to day-care centers.
The major problem, according to Grier, is families live and go to school in one area, then request transportation “to a day-care center not on the route, or near the route, but completely across town.”
“We want to work with parents where we can, and we want to be reasonable,” Grier said.
“But we want the board to understand there are times when requests are unreasonable, and from a practical and financial standpoint, we’re not going to be able to accommodate those requests.”
Moen said GCS would “set up a list of day-care centers we’ll work with, and add more as time goes on. But it can’t become a priority.”
Sam A Hieb is a contributing editor of Carolina Journal.