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Blame busing
Transportation shortfall cited as reason for Peace Wapiti’s $287,460 deficit DAMIEN WOOD
Herald-Tribune staff
Friday December 14, 2007 While the Peace Wapiti School District has managed to balance its budget in the areas of instruction, administration and maintenance, it won’t escape some level of financial strain – the area of transportation is again an issue.
Transportation is the core cause of a $287,460 deficit reported by the district with the submission of its updated budget for the 2007-08 school year.
It’s not a new issue – the district has faced an overall deficit in the last five years of roughly $1.5 million. Most, if not all, of that financial strife can be attributed to the area of school busing, one of the realities of being a large rural district.
For the time being, additional finances will come out of reserves.
“We’re going to take money from our operating reserves so that we will still submit a balanced budget. But every year for the last few years we’ve taken money from our operating reserves, and we’re moving towards a wall,” said Sheldon Rowe, superintendent for the Peace Wapiti School District.
“We’re in a situation where we have to move money away from kids in the classroom in order to get them to the classroom – it’s a rural issue,” said Rodney Lee, deputy superintendent for the district.
‘YOU STILL HAVE TO PICK UP THAT KID’
“If you look at the map and find the end of the road and there’s apt to be a kid there but there may not be another student for five miles. You still have to go and pick up that kid. And if you did have three or four in a row on a stretch of road and some graduate or move, you still have to travel that road.”
It comes down to the same miles, the same wear on the tires and the same drive time, according to Lee. It simply costs what it costs to transport children within a largely rural school district with any level of efficiency.
Even as it stands now, that efficiency is slowly but surely growing more strained with every passing year that the budget doesn’t quite align in this area. A total of 24 bus routes – mostly the district’s longer-distance routes – have had to be cut over the last nine years.
“We can’t reduce bus routes in the Grande Prairie area because those bus routes are full – if you reduce those routes you have no place to put the kids,” said Rowe.
“Where the buses aren’t full are the outer, more rural areas, but in those areas – over the last 10 years – we’ve cut and cut the routes down to where some kids are getting on as early as 7 a.m.”
The district is looking at long travel times for young students in some cases as pushing the extremes of what can be considered reasonable – inflicting any more damage to their transportation strategies to make up financial differences is not an option.
‘10-HOUR WORK DAY’
“How early can you expect a five-year-old to get on a school bus? How late can you expect them to get home? The more buses you cut, the longer the ride times get – we’ve got kids who are on a bus for up to an hour-and-a-half,” said Lee.
“So some are spending three hours on buses and they’re at school for seven hours – you’ve got a five-year-old putting in a 10-hour work day.”
The problem with tapping into operational reserves – one fully recognized by the district’s school board and administration – is that while they’re solving this year’s problem by going to this option, they’re not addressing the problem as it continues to follow trend and carry over into future years.
The district is essentially bleeding away its operational reserves just to stay afloat. When the time comes to tap into it for other projects, it may find that there’s no longer anything there.
“There will be impact from the deficit in plans for next year. It costs about $500,000 to open up a school – Clairmont (school) opens up next year and we’ll need $500,000 and some of that money was going to come from the operating reserves,” said Rowe.
“If we spend (the money) this year on transportation – which we will to make this work – we’ll have less money to open up Clairmont. It won’t show up in the desks or things like that, but it will show up in places like the library – where people will walk in and they’ll see some books but not a lot of books.”
Caught between a rock and a hard place, the district will do what it must this year to make the budget work – even if it means putting the projects of years to come at risk. When given the choice between taking a hit or neglecting the needs of its students, the district doesn’t really see it as a choice at all.
“If, in order to balance our budget, we have to cut bus routes, well, we can’t do that. We can’t have kids running on buses for two hours a day, even though we do have a few doing that now. We can’t have any more – it’s not fair (to the kids),” said Peace Wapiti chairwoman Sonia Ens.
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