Schools Dread Busing Decisions Districts Blame Hard-To-Predict Student Count
Eric Keith had just finished his seventh day in fourth grade when his mom got the phone call.
His classroom at Skyview Elementary School was too full, and starting the next morning, the principal said, he’d have to catch a bus to a school with more room.
Janice Keith was furious. She’d just moved from Billings, Mont., with her husband and four kids, happily settling into a house surrounded by woods and fields and farms. Even Eric, her youngest child and the slowest to adapt to change, liked his classmates and new teacher.
Can schools do that? she wondered.
“His school supplies were still there,” said Janice Keith. “It was terrible.”
In the Spokane area, busing kids from one school to another is not uncommon. Eric, 10, is one of scores of students who don’t have desks in their neighborhood schools.
Until recently, many parents didn’t know busing even occurred in Spokane, perhaps because it’s reserved almost exclusively for newcomers. They heard about it for the first time last week, when an outraged Indian Trail family refused busing for a week, ultimately taking its complaint to the Spokane school board.
The parents of Tiffany Cook, 10, eventually quit fighting for a place in Woodridge Elementary School and enrolled their daughter in a private school. But board members say they are still getting emotional calls from displaced families, just as they do every fall. School administrators in several of the larger districts annually grapple with the problem - which they say is their biggest back-to-school headache.
In the Spokane area, Central Valley tops the busing list with about 100 students this year. Spokane School District 81 buses 38 kids. Mead buses 21, and in the past seven years, East Valley has whittled its number of bused kids from more than 100 to six.
Despite the hours they spend trying to soothe unhappy parents, school officials doubt they’ll ever eliminate busing.
“Not in my lifetime,” said Laurie Dolan, who oversees northwest Spokane schools.
Administrators blame a shifting student population that’s hard to predict, a lack of money, late enrollments and crowded classrooms. Usually they resort to busing when there are several extra students but too few to justify a new teacher, administrators say.
Decisions on when to bus aren’t always black and white.
Class sizes are determined by contracts with teachers unions, and most districts have a general “last in, first out” policy when deciding who to bus. Principals sometimes avoid busing by combining two grades in one classroom or hiring aides.
Other times, kids are allowed to stay when teachers sign waivers to accept extra students. And occasionally, students volunteer to transfer so no one is forced out.
To make matters more perplexing for parents, classrooms may sit empty while kids are bused out. That happens when a school has adequate classroom space, but not enough students to fill it.
“It’s not what you really want to do, because it’s expensive,” said Skip Bonuccelli, spokesman for the Central Valley School District. “And it’s hard on everybody.”
Some districts, however, have found ways to ease some of the heartache for families.
In late summer, Mead secretaries try to predict class sizes by calling the families of all elementary school students who attended last school year. That’s more than 3,000 phone calls.
The routine allows administrators to create fairly accurate class rosters before school starts, said assistant superintendent Al Swanson.
Kids in other districts are often moved up to two weeks after the school year begins, while administrators wait for fluctuating enrollments to stabilize.
“We don’t do that here,” Swanson said. “We try to get them to their assigned school immediately. It seems to work best for us.”
Still, Swanson said, the district couldn’t avoid busing 21 children this year, and he’s become accustomed to upset families.
“Parents, when they buy a house, have an expectation that their child is going to go to that school. There’s no question that they’re going to be disappointed and probably angry.”
In Central Valley, 100 of the district’s 10,700 students are bused from one to six miles.
The opening of Liberty Lake Elementary School next fall should create more space and reduce transfers, Bonuccelli said.
Central Valley principals also try to move kids quickly - usually within two days, he said. “The sooner the move, the less the emotional drain. People bond.”
Brenda Bailey, a former Central Valley PTA president and mother of three, didn’t realize how many kids are bused until she helped set boundaries for the new Liberty Lake school.
“It was an eye-opener,” she said. “It’s amazing how many kids out there are being shuffled. Something somewhere has to be done.”
Bailey and her children were victims of crowded schools six years ago when they lived in the East Valley School District.
When she tried to enroll her three kids in Trentwood Elementary, she learned the school was full.
Her children, who were in grades kindergarten through third, ended up in a room with a teacher of their own. Eventually, administrators placed several other kids from assorted grades there, too. Weeks passed before her children ended up in ordinary classrooms, Bailey said.
“It was a nightmare. The kids were excited to go to a new school, and to be stuck in a room with just the three of them? It was ridiculous.”
Busing is a tough sell to parents, but it is much cheaper than hiring new teachers, administrators say.
Joe Madsen, Spokane’s transportation director, estimates it costs $32,400 to bus the district’s 38 extra kids, who attend 10 elementary schools.
That’s less than the $50,000 it would cost to hire one more teacher for one of the schools. And the state reimburses the district for most of the busing expenses, Madsen said.
In East Valley, the district that’s busing Eric Keith, administrators say they’re thrilled they’re only busing six kids instead of the more than 100 they bused seven years ago.
Bond money has since helped build more classrooms, said Lu Embrey, curriculum director.
“Every year, we reduced it more and more and more,” she said. “We try very hard not to break up families.”
In Eric’s case, Principal Harold Weakland said he had to move the boy because the class was filled beyond the 28 students allowed under a teacher contract.
“It’s pretty matter of fact,” he said.
Janice Keith isn’t convinced. After two weeks at Trentwood Elementary, Eric is adjusting, she said. His new school is a bit closer to her home.
But Eric shouldn’t have had to go through the emotional havoc just because he’s a newcomer, she said. She compared the situation with bait-and-switch advertising, in which someone pays for one thing and gets something else. Somehow, Keith said, newcomers should be warned about crowded schools when they’re shopping for homes.
“Typically, the school’s the first place you find a home and fit in with the community,” she said. “So this has been very disillusioning.”
, DataTimes