Should public, private school buses be linked?

Conssolidation of systems to be studied

Friday, July 17, 2009

The county commissioners met Tuesday with the St. Mary's school board to discuss this and several other issues.

County Administrator John Savich said county staff will study any possibility of consolidating the services, including staffing, vehicles and routes.

"We want to examine this. We want to study this," he said.

The county government has paid the cost of transporting students to private schools for generations and that cost now comes to nearly $2 million a year.

St. Mary's public schools' transportation department runs the public school bus system. St. Mary's County government separately hires contractors to run 41 buses to transport 2,250 students to private schools in the county, including six Catholic schools, Leonard Hall Junior Naval Academy, a Mennonite school, a Montessori school and other religious schools.

Savich said Tuesday that in a survey of other Maryland jurisdictions he found four other counties — Charles, Howard, Cecil and Carroll — that do pay the costs of transporting private school students in some way or another.

In addition, Baltimore and Frederick counties have policies but are not providing transportation, he said.

Charles County public schools provide transportation for about 700 students from five private schools — four Catholic and one Christian academy.

There are 11 dedicated buses to St. Peter's Catholic School and four other private schools share buses with public schools.

All are part of Charles County public schools' contracted bus fleet.

In Calvert, private and parochial schools are on their own; neither Calvert County government nor the school system pay for bus transportation to non-public schools.

"There's a parallel system running in the county," Superintendent Michael Martirano said, agreeing that the pros and cons of consolidating them need to be looked at.

School board member Sal Raspa said the debate over the private school bus service has gone on for decades.

"Things do change. There's a thing called progress," Raspa said.

Raspa said the study should include community and parent input.

"We all know our parochial schools are under a lot of pressure right now," Commissioner Daniel H. Raley (D) said. "I certainly don't want to add to that."

St. Mary's County government has been paying for buses to take students to and from private schools for more than 70 years.

"We appreciate it… and are very grateful for the service," Father Andrew White School Principal Linda Maloney said Thursday.

"I certainly feel it's extremely important to the non-public schools," she said. About 85 percent of students from Father Andrew White use the bus system.

"It would be very, very difficult to add that large of an expense to our individual budgets," she said, adding that they have not looked into the costs.

Maloney said that if the county does study the issue, "I would hope they would invite some representation from non-public schools."

After the county's public works director suggested last year that the public schools take over running the service, lawyers were brought in to determine who was responsible according to state law — the public school system or the county government directly.

The county has paid for and operated the non-public school transportation in its budget since at least 1933 when the Code of Public Local Laws of Maryland was updated.

The law said that St. Mary's commissioners were authorized, ‘‘in their discretion, to provide for the transportation to and from school of children attending any school in St. Mary's County," and that the transportation was ‘‘to be provided by the Board of Education of St. Mary's County in the school buses already provided for by said board of education."

St. Mary's public school staff said last year said that they are not required to provide school buses for private and parochial schools. Both the county and school board attorneys were investigating the matter at the time.

The county tries to stay in sync with St. Mary's public school bus driver rates and benefits and the drivers require the same certification, although some of the rules and procedures between the two systems, including disciplinary measures, do differ.

The county will transport a student from anywhere in the county to any parochial school in the county, even if that means a bus ride from a home in Piney Point or Ridge to Mother Catherine Spalding School in Helen.

St. Mary's County contracts 41 buses to transport about 2,000 private school students from the county along with five students from out of the county to serve 14 non-public schools, according to the county's budget. The average annual bus route mileage is 701,000 in fiscal year 2008.

The county had budgeted $1.9 million is fiscal year 2008.

The average cost per mile for county government's private school buses was $2.71 in fiscal year 2008, about the same as the two previous years.

St. Mary's public schools student transportation budget totaled about $12.9 million in fiscal year 2008.

Buses covered nearly 4 million miles that same year, for an average cost of $3.23 a mile, nearly a dollar more than just two years prior.

This includes buses for sports teams, class trips, special education transportation and a hub system to the school system's high school academies as well as office and overhead expenses.

During Tuesday's meeting the commissioners and school board also discussed revenue projections from the county and updates to the comprehensive land-use plan, which impacts land acquisition for new school sites.

"We really never leave the budget cycle entirely," Martirano said of the boards' preliminary planning for fiscal year 2011 budgets.

jyeatman@somdnews.com