Dealing with High Gas Prices
by Darrel Stufflebeam
May 20, 2008
Just like you, Rock Creek USD 323 has to deal with soaring gas prices and other inflated costs that occur as a result. Also like you, we will have to look for ways to cut costs to compensate. In regard to fuel use, however, school districts have limited options.
The primary fuel cost for school districts is everyday bus routes. School districts are required to transport (or reimburse) all students living 2.5 miles or more from their school and are given state aid for that. Like many school districts, we transport all students living outside city limits and some living within city limits if there appears to be a safety issue.
Cutting back the number of bus routes has little or no impact on fuel costs because the students have to be picked up regardless. As a result, the only real savings on cutting routes is the wages of the driver. If we did that, however, students will ride on their bus much longer and buses may be overcrowded, which is already a problem on some routes.
The only way to significantly reduce fuel consumption would be to stop transporting kids that live closer than 2.5 miles from their school but the logistics of that would be difficult. For example, many families have children that live more than 2.5 miles from one school but within 2.5 from another school. Should the school district transport some of the family’s children but not their others? As you can see, cutting costs for bus routes is a difficult challenge.
The other major source of fuel cost is co-curricular activities. Since we already take the minimum number of vehicles to these activities, there is no way to reduce costs if we want to continue to participate.
In order to compensate for higher prices, we will look at other fuel-related costs like field trips and in-town transportation. Because other costs are soaring as well (particularly health insurance, energy, and food) we will also examine cost savings in other areas of our budget. Since we are already fiscally “lean and mean”, the challenge of finding more savings is exceedingly difficult.
The school board has requested a budget making us eligible for New Facility Funding and they will continue to weigh the advantages of securing a large amount of state funding with the disadvantages of an estimated two-year, six-mill increase. On one hand, it will be more difficult than ever to raise local taxes. On the other hand, it will more difficult than ever to turn down a large amount of money from the state and a large return on local investment—especially since state funding will almost certainly lag far behind soaring operational costs.
