Buses owned by First Student are seen parked at the company’s Warren bus yard. (Ken Castro/Rhode Island Current)
Good on Sen. Linda Ujifusa, a Portsmouth Democrat, for initiating a legislative student transportation study commission. As a state, Rhode Island is way overdue for tightening its efficiency, fiscal responsibility and responsiveness to the public. The state’s willy nilly non-systems (think public schools) annoy all citizens.
The reasonable complaints from Ujifusa’s district triggered her concerns. Portsmouth spends $80,000 per year to bus two special needs students to appropriate facilities out of the district. A standard 72-person school bus also costs roughly $80,000.
Each of Rhode Island’s 36 tiny school districts has some version of this problem. But modern technology and a willingness to let go of how it’s always been done provide a golden opportunity to build a truly useful and potentially model student transportation strategy.
Fortunately, the 13-member commission, mandated in S-2523, includes a representative from the Rhode Island Public Transportation Authority (RIPTA) which would be the natural core of a new system. Eligible Providence high school students already get to school with RIPTA passes. RIPTA now routes these students to their neighborhoods instead of pouring all of them and their teenage rivalries into Kennedy Plaza at the same time.
The bad news is writ large in the bill’s press release. The bill emphasizes controlling the cost of the statewide transportation system by targeting the “far flung” students who attend a “private, parochial, charter or career and technical school.”
The committee, which will next meet on Monday afternoon, includes no representatives of any of the affected “far flung students.” Yes, the department that handles child protective services is there, but surely no one would cut services from the small number of struggling kids in state care?
For decades, districts have tried to cut private and parochial students’ transportation, as if their parents didn’t pay steep taxes or as if those schools had no low-income kids. Charter schools pay a big chunk of their per pupil expenditure to the district (16.4%), mainly for transportation, but districts don’t want responsibility for them either. A student who doesn’t attend a district school isn’t one of “our” kids.
In 1977, the Department of Education (RIDE) divided the state into transportation regions, each contracted out to bus companies. The maps have been redrawn, sometimes ridiculously, like creating a region with districts on opposite sides of the Narragansett Bay. Regions themselves create inefficient boundaries that just add to the inefficiency of each individual district’s need to bus its own kids, within its own boundary.
But thanks to modern technology, solutions abound.
Under discussion for years was getting one company with sophisticated software to manage all routing for the state. Individual bus companies can use routing to pad the need for more buses and can honor district wishes to inconvenience, say, private school kids.
Modern technology and a willingness to let go of how it’s always been done provide a golden opportunity to build a truly useful and potentially model student transportation strategy.
Officially, Rhode Island has 136,00 public school students. Weirdly, RIDE no longer collects or reports the numbers of private, parochial or home-schooled students, but surely including them would bring the total school population to roughly 140,000, similar to that of Dallas. Conceding caveats like cost of living, Dallas’ 2022-23 transportation costs were just over $67 million, while Rhode Island’s were $146 million. Do the math. Taking transportation away from some kids is just a bad hack.
We need a system independent of bias against the “far flungs.”
So, with RIPTA acting as the core and overseers, small ancillary services could fill out the larger system, for that “last mile,” as Amazon calls it.
For example, RIPTA’s clever new Flex on Demand initiative in South Couty works like a rideshare service. Think Uber. Participants request a ride, for a small fee, and can watch the vehicle’s progress on their phone. RIPTA CEO Christopher Durand says integrating the convenience of rideshare with the reliability of public transportation gives riders with “more choices and greater control.” The service is so popular, RIPTA is adding another vehicle.
Also consider the Metropolitan Regional Career and Technical Center (The MET) in Providence and Newport; its signature educational strategy is to connect students with mentors working in the real world. To get kids to scattered jobs during school hours, The MET Director of Outreach Brian Mills says they investigated non-emergency transport software — much like RIPTA’s RIde system for people with disabilities. Changes can be made on the fly, skipping the kid who just called in sick or changing workplace destinations.
The routes are efficient because they’re not static, but responsive to the need.
Back to Portsmouth. A centralized routing company could send a jitney, with a trained aide, to collect a small group of special needs students from multiple proximate districts and take them to, say, Providence’s Groden Center or the Bradley School. Consolidating district and student needs would avoid spending $80,000 for two kids. I live near both of those schools where squadrons of sparsely-used buses idle in the fresh air.
Eliminating the tangle of boundaries and inefficiencies would itself get more kids where they need to be, on time and with less hassle. Because, let’s face it, inconvenient, unreliable transportation promotes chronic absenteeism.
A centralized state routing system could serve all kids better and without bias.
Yes, the state would have to figure out how to charge districts or absorb the costs of a centralized system. But if the overall costs got anywhere near the Dallas expenditure, everyone involved would be happier.
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