Published: July 24, 2008 08:57 pm      

SCHOOLS: Rising diesel prices putting pinch on bus fleets

With no clear end in sight for rising oil prices, school districts are forced to find room in their budgets for ever-expanding transportation costs — which means students could have to walk farther or get more rides from parents.

Transportation budgets are swelling as the price of diesel, the primary fuel for school buses, has shot up as much as 65 percent in the past year, with the U.S. average topping $4.80 per gallon.

The Niagara Falls City School District had initially budgeted about $275,000 for the upcoming school year’s transportation costs, but the school board last month approved more than double that amount due to an increasingly volatile market, said business administrator James Ingrasci.

“We’ve anticipated fuel going up to $5 per gallon, but it’s still going up,” Ingrasci said. “If it goes over $5 per gallon, then we’ve got to go back and look at increasing our budget again.”

If the $575,000 the district budgeted this year — almost double what was spent on fuel two years ago — isn’t enough to transport its thousands of eligible students, the district may have to dip into its contingency funds and look at making some cuts “as far away from the classroom as possible,” Ingrasci said.

The district has already optimized its routes and eliminated unnecessary bus runs, limiting ways the district can reduce its transportation costs, said Carmen Granto, superintendent.

“We’ve got to transport the kids — what are we going to do?” Granto said. “Anything below a mile and half, they walk. That’s far enough. We’re not going to make it 2 miles, that’s crazy. There’s too many city streets and traffic.”

In the Niagara-Wheatfield Central School District, all students are eligible to be transported to school by bus. But students can be required to walk up to two-tenths of a mile to a bus stop — a distance the school board could soon increase, said Terry Eisenman, Niagara-Wheatfield transportation director.

“Our budget has gone from roughly $150,000 to $450,000 in just three to four years — that’s just hard for us to keep up with,” he said. “If the cost goes much higher, we’re going to have to do something. Right now we’re looking to reduce miles where we can.”

Another idea the school board may consider if prices start getting too high is cutting out early bus runs, which are only used by a small portion of students.

“I think we’d be looking at any bus runs that can be consolidated,” said business administrator Kerin Dumphrey. “Certainly, we don’t want to take away the ability of kids to have after-school activities, but to do things as efficiently as possible, I think we have to just focus on after-school activities and not the before-school activities. But we’re not going to change things that are needed.”

The district put about 940,000 miles on its 70 buses this past year, a slight increase over last year, and could save as much as 10 percent on fuel costs if it introduced consolidation plans, Eisenman said.

Don Rappold, interim superintendent for the Lewiston-Porter Central School District, is hoping the district doesn’t find itself in a situation similar to this past year. For 2007-08, the district had budgeted $160,000 for transportation but ended up spending more than $230,000 by the year’s end. For this coming year, the district budgeted $175,000, an amount Rappold acknowledged may not be enough at a budget workshop in March.

Rappold said Wednesday he was “concerned” about the rising fuel prices, but was hopeful they would level off.

“This stuff stabilizes and we’re hoping it stabilizes,” Rappold said. “If not, we’re going to have to find another way to fund it.”

Lew-Port, like Niagara Falls and Niagara-Wheatfield, uses computer routing programs to look for the most efficient bus routes possible, but the savings of tightening existing bus routes may not be enough to handle ballooning costs.

To cover the extra $70,000 in costs over budget this past year, the district shifted around money within the transportation budget, consolidating its special education routes and identifying “things that we didn’t need to spend,” Rappold said.

If the fuel budget is too low again, the district might have to turn to its contingency budget, which is about 2 percent or $80,000, Rappold said.