will high fuel prices bring an end to school busing?

thus the diversity programs in place in many school districts?

Wake County NC buses travel 17,000,000 miles per year (http://www.wcpss.net/transportation/index.html)
and school buses get, on the average, 7mpg (http://www.americanschoolbuscouncil.org/index.php?page=fuel-calculator) and diesel fuel at ~$3.57/gallon (http://www.eia.doe.gov/oog/info/gdu/gasdiesel.asp) that works out to cost $8,670,000.00 in fuel alone (not including maintenance).

If fuel prices continue to increase, should the priority be:

teachers or busing?

they are trying to do away with child labor laws, so just put them kids too work instead of wastin time in skool...

mark

in NC a free public education is a constitutionally protected right so that is highly unlikely to occur.

as are the child labor laws that the GOP is now trying to repeal...

Nothing is safe right now.

mark

But we don't live in one those anymore, so all bets are off.

Perhaps 60 cents per day? It doesn't sound budget-breaking to me.

what then?

the question still stands:

busing or teachers?

median teacher's salary is in the low $40s (yea yea I know....way too low) that works out to 216 new teachers or 8000 new computers or new books for almost every student in the system.

$8million isn't exactly chump change and is spending that finite resource busing kids around the best choice of expenditure?

A doubling of retail fuel prices is unlikely to happen quickly, so it's a hypothetical question, but I would say that $1.20 for student transport is still acceptable.

but in terms of 'what if fuel goes up', it's the amount to look at.

The city schools are predominantly minority and the suburban ones are largely white. Unless there is busing between districts (which will likely never happen) busing for racial balance became impossible.

I am glad my kids are past this stage, scary stuff anymore

We need to obtain and retain high quality teachers, this requires that we actually pay for them. In fact we need to raise the salaries of teachers across the board in order to obtain and retain high quality teachers.

We need to also pay for transportation. Having parents transport their kids to school would be a logistical nightmare, and in many cases it would result in many students missing a significant portion of the school year.

The other factor that we need to pay for is to insure that all of our school facilities are up to date, and in good repair. Hard for a teacher to teach, and a student to learn, when the heating doesn't work in the middle of winter, or when rain leaks in during a thunderstorm.

The fact of the matter is that we need to spend more on education, period.

How about we give up corporate welfare and wars instead.

It's not going to happen soon. So, what are your workaround suggestions? It's fine to say that we need to spend more money on this or that program or situation. It's easy to say. It's not happening, especially given the takeover by the Republicans in the House and in many state legislatures. Until that changes, we're going to need workarounds. The children are still going to school, the hungry still need to be fed, and stuff needs to be done. None of that can wait until we get the ideal conditions we all recognize are needed.

What's your suggestion for a workaround on education, since you believe yourself to be an expert in that area?

I thought the supreme court ruled against that a few years ago.

I didn't know they even still made diesel ones any more.

Don

crises.

and how far away those schools often are from the homes of the poor rural people, busing is as much a necessity as anything. If they stop busing, many poor kids (whose families do not have cars) will have no way to get to school at all. Good luck enforcing the mandatory school attendance requirement without busing. All that will happen is that either scores of low-income parents will go to jail for not being able to get their kids to school, or they'll take their kids out of public school completely and enroll them in the only schools that are still close enough to walk to--the tiny neighborhood church "schools" that teach science out of the book of Genesis.

That's really not in anyone's best interests--not the public school system, and *certainly* not the kids themselves.

We have open enrollment here, and parents can choose any school in our large district. Up until now, buses have gone all over the city, transporting students from every part of the city to every other part. At least 12 buses went by my house every morning. That's gone, now. Students can still attend any school they wish, but they will not be transported there by bus. If they can't get there, they'll go to a school in their neighborhood.

It's not a popular change, as you'd expect. A few magnet schools will still get the city-wide bus service, but that's it. Parents will have to get their children to school if they opt for one that's far from their home.

The busing system was unworkable from the beginning, and horribly expensive. Many students had to catch buses at 6AM to make it to school by the beginning of the school day, and spent up to 2 hours each way riding on the bus. In my own neighborhood, the parade of kids heading for the bus stop began before 6 AM. That's not a solution to anything, in my opinion.

Big problems all around.