Reinstating School Busing

By Robert J. Levy

Pay for busing by - fee for parents of students, fee from all other residents, businesses and so on

The city will act as the coordinator, contracting for bus services, and receiving the money paid by the parents and the community to pay those contracts. This will accomplish several things:

1. There will be one bus system rather than two. It is possible that one bus could pick up both HS and ES students.

2. Because the city is the contractor, Sacramento's Education Department probably can't say, "You're forgetting that we've ruled that no school district may pay more than any other (The "we can't all be rich, so we must all be poor" syndrome)."

3. The school districts' only responsibility will be to provide the names and addresses of their students, and the students' parents. Mr. Knapp, the city manager has an interest in this program, and has managed to solve similar problems in the past.

4. Provisions will be able to be made for student activities which require bus transportation. Under some circumstances, there may be an additional fee charged for this transportation.

In what we call the Tri-Schools area: Kennedy, Lincoln, and Monta Vista HS, there are about 4,000 students, nearly three quarters of whom are driven to school, or drive themselves. As this amounts to something between 1500 and 3000 cars the roads surrounding the schools are a mess during school days' drop-off and pick-up times. If these students could be put in 50 passenger buses, that traffic load would be reduced to 30 to 60 buses.

Traffic in and around all of the other schools in the city have similer impacts. The benefits of busing may not be as great, but the traffic relief will be there none-the less.

This is twenty-three years over-due. It could have been done any-time after Proposition 13 that the city and schools were willing. Maybe it had to get terrible before we could muster the collective will to solve the problem.