In Pinellas, elected leaders seem to ignore the perils of school choice, such as increased transportation costs for overlapping or distant bus routes for students.

Lee Benjamin, a lifelong educator and chairman of the Pinellas School Board, has found a way to deal with the spiraling costs associated with a new countywide choice student assignment plan. Treated last week to a meticulously documented report that says the school system will have to spend between $7.5-million and $8.9-million more a year on busing for choice, he leaned across the board table and said: "When I add all this up, I have a hard time finding $7-million. I just don't see it."

Nancy Bostock, the board's avowed fiscal conservative, offered her own cheerful assessment. "We're not putting it into buses," she said. "We're putting it into getting kids to their schools of choice." Max Gessner, a former education administrator finishing his first term on the board, said the costs could be lowered by using taxis or commercial vans on routes that transport few children -- to "pick up some of those loose ends," as he called it.

As the district moves inexorably toward a plan that could eventually change the school assignment for every family in Pinellas and transfer millions of dollars from the classrooms to the highways, many of the elected leaders are following a perilous path of choice. They're choosing denial.

The busing is a prime example. Under choice, which is to begin in 2003-04, the district could be responsible for picking up children in Pinellas Point at the southern tip of the county and transporting them to Tarpon Springs High on the northern end. It might send several buses down the same neighborhood street to pick up children for trips to several different elementary schools. Even if only a few children choose a distant school, the county would pick them up. As transportation director Terry Palmer notes, "it only takes one student to add a whole bus."

That makes transportation costly. In the first year of choice, the district would need to operate roughly 200 more buses, an increase of 38 percent. (Also, the fine print is that the routes would be "arterial," meaning the students wouldn't be picked up very close to their homes, and that some school starting times might change.) Worse, the cost of their operation would not be reimbursed by the state. This year, the district spent $15-million on busing, of which $7-million was not reimbursed. That means the district would be spending roughly $15-million a year on busing without state reimbursement -- money that, as a result, would come directly out of classroom needs.

Buses are not the only cost of choice. The district has employed administrators full-time on the task, devising computer programs to sort the applications, staffing parent information centers to explain the alternatives. It has hired consultants and paid for surveys. Yet the district has yet to generate a detailed accounting of these other costs.

Only one board member, Jane Gallucci, seems willing to raise the legitimate questions posed by the district's financial predicament. Over the past year, Pinellas has been forced to cut summer school alternatives, take money from reserves, and use long-term substitutes as teachers. This week, superintendent Howard Hinesley announced the elimination of 90 more jobs, including some guidance counselors. As Gallucci notes, the board's initial commitment to choice was done in the notable absence of any financial projections. It has since submitted the plan to a federal judge who approved it as part of a negotiated settlement to the county's three-decade-old desegregation court order.

"As we get this information about cost, aren't we remiss as leaders if we don't evaluate it and see it in the context of our current financial crisis?" Gallucci asks. "Is it such a bad thing to go back to the judge and say, 'This is costing us more money than we thought'?"

Gallucci raises a modest question, though Benjamin and others shout it down as if it were heresy. Make changes to the plan? We would be thrown into federal court and hauled off to jail. But last week Hinesley told board members he is negotiating with NAACP Legal Defense Fund attorney Enrique Escarraz to determine whether racial ratios required in the first four years of the agreement can be relaxed. So why can't he also explore ways to minimize the costs of choice, through more choice zones, through greater neighborhood guarantees, through less administrative complexity? The choice plans that Pinellas continues to cite as models, such as Lee and St. Lucie counties and Charlotte-Mecklenburg in North Carolina, are not nearly as extensive as Pinellas. (Charlotte even guarantees every student a home school assignment.)

The board members who refuse to acknowledge the true impact of choice are only setting the plan up for failure. They argue that choice will improve education but, sensing that most families in Pinellas don't want it, provide an exemption for any current student who wants to ignore it. As if to demonstrate the depth of their denial, they then call the exemption a form of choice itself. The next time Benjamin tries to add things up, he needs to use a calculator.

Back to Opinion

Contact the Times | Privacy Policy
Standard of Accuracy | Terms, Conditions & Copyright

From the Times
Opinion page