INVESTIGATION: Worcester School Busing Can Cost Up to $18,000 a Student

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Thursday, November 20, 2014

Patrick Sargent, GoLocal Worcester Contributor

Due to some bizarre requirements in Federal Law, the Worcester Public School Department is paying as much as $18,000 to transport some individual students in a school year. The McKinney-Vento transportation mandate is costing the city up $100 a day for one student to travel back and forth between Worcester and the their home outside of the Worcester School District.

“McKinney-Vento says you can stay in your school of origin and the school district has to provide transportation back to the school you started in, within reason. That means we are trying to bus kids all over the city. It’s not unusual for one of these arrangements to run between $800 to $1,000 a week, sometimes for one child. That’s not even to teach them, that’s just to get them in the building,” said Judith Thompson, Worcester Public School Homeless Liaison.

The Cost to Worcester

In 2013, the Worcester Public School system spent nearly $500,000 on McKinney-Vento mandated transportation.

The transportation requirements of McKinney-Vento applies to students who are homeless. The mandate states that students have the right to continue attending their “school of origin”. Even if a student obtains permanent housing during the school year, the student has the right to stay in their current school until the end of the school year. For example, in Worcester, that means a student living on Grafton Hill, who had moved from the West Side area, could continue to attend Doherty High School, instead of North High School.

“If they are so far out, and we don’t have a bus available in that neighborhood, or the time to add onto to an existing route, or an opening that we can add a trip for this child, the family is given WRTA (Worcester Regional Transit Authority) tickets to get to and from school,” said John Hennessey, Worcester Public School’s Director of Transportation.

“We prefer to give them the direct transportation, but in some cases, it just plain doesn’t exist,” said Hennessey. “If a child has a Special Education IEP (Individual Education Plan) that includes transportation as part of it, the district that the child came from is liable for 100% of the cost of that transportation.”

Thompson said,”So we have all these kids, they go out of town, and we are dealing with 40 to 50 school districts. Their kids are here in Worcester and we are busing them out there, or our kids are out there and we are having to work out with that school district to bus them back here.”

According to Hennessey, transportation can run the city as low as $20 to $40 per day, or as much as over $100 a day per vehicle, “depending on where they’re coming from and what the time frame is.” This year, Fitchburg is the furthest away a Worcester student lives. Going back and forth to Fitchburg costs the city between $80 to $100 a day.

In previous years, Worcester has had to go as far as Framingham to transport students. “We have had families that are placed in the Emergency Shelter System that are in hotels in Framingham. They have the right to enroll out there if they want or they have to right to school continuity, which means that our school district and the other school district have to work out a cost share for transportation back here,” said Thompson.

Inside and Outside of the City

The city tries to keep the travel distance from Worcester under an hour away. The school system has to follow Special Education guidelines and has to meet requirements made by the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE). “The DESE has supported that one hour as being a reasonable threshold because any longer than that is just an awful lot taken out on the student,” said Hennessey. “If in fact they happen to be in an extended-day after school program that has extra hours to begin with, then it’s sun up to sun down and beyond.”

Thompson said, “You could theoretically have to route every school to every address in the city. There comes a point where it’s just not possible to do that with a limited number of vehicles.”

 

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