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Pinellas must find a way out of school bus maze

The school district is paying a high price for its choice plan: more students riding buses, more routes, more costs. And for what? Something's got to give.

The busing gridlock in the Pinellas County school district can be blamed, certainly, on a lack of manpower and insufficient planning and communication. But three years after embarking on a choice student assignment plan that has created a stifling transportation maze, the district has to confront a larger reality.

This level of busing is simply unsustainable.

The numbers themselves are dizzying. Under choice, student ridership has jumped from 32,000 to 45,000. The number of routes needed to serve those students and the budget have increased by half. The district will spend $38-million this year on buses, and here's the financial kicker: Because Pinellas transports students in so many different directions, on buses that are barely half full, the state reimburses only $17-million of that amount. The rest comes directly out of the classroom. On top of that, the $23-million pot of money the district set aside to ease the transition will be gone at the end of the school year.

Something has to give.

Superintendent Clayton Wilcox says he hopes the new community task force on choice will take a look at the problem, and it should. The random, crisscrossing nature of the bus routes is derived in large part from the random, open-ended design of school choice. In Florida's most densely populated county, a student can choose any of more than a dozen public high schools. An elementary student in south Pinellas has 24 choices. Because the plan all but severs the connection between a home and the nearest school and because preferred schools fill up so quickly, Pinellas often plays a form of foreign exchange. It swaps a student in one school with another who lives farther away.

These convoluted transportation patterns, and the costs associated with them, might be acceptable if they were achieving a worthy educational goal. But the next school year is the last one for court-ordered racial ratios, and even the outgoing St. Petersburg NAACP president and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund attorney predict some schools eventually will become all-white or all-black. Why, then, would the district bus 13,000 more children to achieve less integration? By reducing unnecessary busing, especially in north Pinellas, couldn't the district spend some of that money on building true academic magnets at schools that hope to attract racially mixed enrollments?

Schools are supposed to be places of learning, but that objective is undermined by a transportation system that forces some students to begin their days at 7:05 a.m. and steals money from the classroom to run buses. More command center operators and route supervisors may be needed to relieve the current gridlock, but this problem is only going to worsen as fewer students qualify for exemption from choice assignment. Something has to change.

[Last modified August 13, 2005, 00:41:02]