When a bill that would “restore flexibility to the school calendar” went before the House Education Committee in March, opponents of the measure were surprised to find more than 200 public school administrators from around the state in the committee room. Opponents were even more surprised to learn the school officials had been ferried from a convention in Durham County in a convoy of Wake County school buses.

Louise Lee, a parent and former teacher representing the citizens’ group “Save Our Summers,” rode the elevator with several of the administrators that morning and said one of them told her they had taken “six or seven” buses to the meeting. Kent Williams, another parent with SOS, said, “It looks pretty darn good if your group is showing up to lobby in your school buses. They were using this in a political fashion, to speak for changing a law that many of us had worked very hard to secure—and my taxes funded them being there.”

According to Wake County School Board member Ron Margiotta, use of the county’s school buses for this trip was standard procedure during the administration of former Superintendent Bill McNeal, who is now executive director of the N.C. Association of School Administrators. However, the association’s trip March 29 raised questions of permissible use, and officials at the Wake County Public School System have since halted all community rentals of the school system’s white activity buses.

Yellow and white

In the 2004-2005 school year, the N.C. Department of Public Instruction spent more than $261 million to operate 13,519 school buses, according to the most recent DPI statistical report. Nearly 60 percent of public school students ride the bus, at a cost of $506 per student per year counting all sources.

But N.C. law makes a distinction between the traditional yellow school buses, which belong to the district transportation pool, and the white activity buses assigned to individual schools. Besides their use for school groups, the activity buses may be leased to nonprofit organizations under certain circumstances, according to Derek Graham, chief of transportation services at the Department of Public Instruction.

“Yellow buses can only be used for instructional purposes by the local school district,” Graham said, writing from a school transportation conference in Asheville. “Activity buses are for school activities, either instructional or not,” such as trips for athletic events— “[but] state law also allows them to be leased to non-profits for transporting school age children,” he said, referencing G.S. 66-58.

That statute says that state and local government will not provide transportation services in competition with private enterprise, except for the use of public school buses and activity buses for specified purposes, including nonprofits using them to transport schoolchildren to activities at their facilities. Other statutes stipulate that such use, even by emergency management teams or the National Guard, must be fully reimbursed to the local school board.

Whether to offer the buses for community use is at the discretion of the local board, Graham said. “The school system is not required to do such — they are allowed to,” he said.

Sketchy documentation

However, Wake school system policy is not clear, according to the system’s Web site. In late June, the departmental phone list on the district’s Web site, though dated 2006, still listed Vern Hatley as the director of transportation. Hatley resigned from district in October 2004. He is serving a seven-to10-year prison sentence for conspiracy and obtaining property under false pretenses while he was in charge of the Wake bus fleet. Wake school board policy also has gaps, referencing some transportation provisions on a state statute that was repealed 26 years ago. The board policy was last revised in 1998.

Michelle Faircloth, school system transportation dispatcher, said that she couldn’t address policy questions, but confirmed that the district no longer allowed nonprofits to use the activity buses.

“At present we are not doing that,” she said. “We’ve had issues since our scandal,” referring to the 2004 fraud case that landed five Wake school system transportation employees, including in jail. The system has a pool of activity buses assigned to the central transportation facility, and Faircloth said, she scheduled the buses for association of school administrators as a normal request from her managers. However, she was notified after the trip March 29 that the schools would no longer lease buses to outside groups.

“There was no way [for the lessees] to pay the drivers,” she said, since billing and invoicing for the buses goes through the accounting department rather than county schools’ payroll process. “You can’t reimburse payroll codes through Accounting.”

“That is what changed the policy,” she said.

No more bus trips

Margiotta might have been responsible for the change, since he contacted Wake Superintendent Dell Burns shortly after the trip in question. Margiotta said that Dr. Burns “did not appreciate” the buses being used in that way. “He said he didn’t think it should go on, and said it would never happen again,” said Margiotta. “He was not pleased.”

To Williams’ point, the administrators’ appearance at that particular hearing was not planned that way. The association announced the visit’s date months before the committee’s agenda was set. The Winter/Spring issue of the association’s magazine, Leadership, announced that, “as always”, the conference would include “a strong emphasis … on legislation affecting education” — and that buses for the trip would leave from the hotel.

Williams was still bothered by the appearance. “Something didn’t smell right about the way it went down,” he said. “I’d feel the same way if I observed if from any group—either you have a policy that clearly indicates how to use things, or you don’t.”

In his opinion, “It was completely unethical and unauthorized use of buses, period.”

Margiotta agrees. “You shouldn’t use taxpayers’ money to make a political statement, and that’s what this was,” he said. “I thought I left this kind of thing in New Jersey.”

Hal Young is a contributing editor of Carolina Journal.