B. Kentucky
Year
Pupil Transportation
Expenditure
Vocational Education Transportation
Expenditure Total
2003 $202,216,300 $2,416,900 $204,633,200
2004 $212,106,200 $2,416,900 $214,523,100
2005 $211,953,500 $2,416,900 $241,370,400
2006 $211,953,500 $2,416,900 $241,370,400
2007 $211,953,500 $2,416,900 $241,370,400
2008 $214,752,800 $2,416,900 $217,169,700
2009 $214,752,800 $2,416,900 $217,169,700
2010 $214,752,800 $2,416,900 $217,169,700
Table 8: Kentucky School Transportation Budget
Kentucky law is not as generous as some state laws in the provision of pupil
transportation for students who attend a school outside their own attendance area and reside more than one mile from the school of attendance. The “Hitcher Provision” requires that school buses are not allowed to add either time or mileage or in any way alter the designated bus route to provide transportation for said students. Also the said student is only granted access to the bus if space is available.
Local school districts are reimbursed separately from the SEEK program for the cost of transporting pupils from a parent school to a vocational-technical school or to a vocational education center. Local school districts are also required by law to provide transportation of its resident pupils who are enrolled in the Kentucky Schools for the Deaf or Blind, as resident pupils, to and from school on a regularly scheduled basis, at intervals of not less than once per week. This funding is a separate appropriation from the SEEK funding. When a local school system approves the placement of a special needs student in a program it does not operate, it must ensure that transportation is provided at no cost to the parents.
29 C. Maryland
Year
Pupil Transportation
Expenditures
Total Education Spending
Percentage of Education Spending for
Pupil Transportation 2004 $167,009,034 $4,320,816,377 3.80%
2005 $175,534,529 $4,673,098,806 3.70%
2006 $187,123,730 $5,110,133,359 3.60%
2007 $202,079,378 $5,368,596,777 3.70%
2008 $219,023,786 $6,407,601,018 3.40%
Table 9: Maryland School Transportation Budget
In Calvert County, the school board may provide transportation to and from school on a public school bus for a student who attends a nonpublic school if the school bus is not already filled to capacity, if the student resides on, along, or near a public highway in the county on which a public school bus or conveyance operate, if the student resides in the public school transportation district served by the public school bus, if the routes, school days, and hours of transportation coincide with the routes, school days, and hours of transportation for students attending public schools in the county, and in the case of a student who attends a nonpublic school that is not on the public school bus route, only to the public school on the route which is nearest to the nonpublic school.
In Montgomery County, a fee may not be charged for transporting public school students to school from their designated bus stop locations or from school to their designated bus stop locations.
Each local school system must provide or arrange for the transportation during the regular school year of each child with a disability if the student attends a public school, a school maintained by a state agency, or a non public school with the county of residence. If the
transportation is needed for outside the county of residency the local school system of the county in which the child with a disability resides shall certify and pay the cost of his daily or other reasonable transportation to school if state aid has provide for the education of the child.
The disabled student grant is calculated by multiplying the number of students who are disabled by $1000 (for fiscal year 2008).
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Each district that transports some students (transported student percentage greater than zero) received an adjustment to account for inflation because the regression analysis was based on prior year data. The payment was equal to a percentage of the product of the district’s
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transportation base from the prior fiscal year times the updated average efficient transportation use cost per student times an inflation factor of two and eight tenths per cent.
Payment for extra service miles run on days public school is not in session was made by multiplying the extra miles by a per mile amount approved by the state board of education.
The formula for calculation of regular education payment amounts depends on what type of transportation the school district uses in transporting its students. If they use board-owned and operated school buses (Type 1) or contractor owned and operated school buses (Type II) then the above formula is used for reimbursement. If the district uses public utilities (Type III) then the reimbursement is determined by multiplying the number of eligible pupils by a per pupil amount approved by the state board of education. If the district provides payments to a parent or
guardian for pupil transportation (Type IV) then reimbursement is determined by multiplying the number of eligible pupils by a per pupil amount approved by the state board of education. If the district uses board-owned vehicles other than school buses (Type V) than the reimbursement is determined by multiplying the total annual miles by a per mile amount approved by the state board of education. Finally, if the district uses privately owned vehicles other than school buses (Type VI) then the reimbursement is determined by multiplying the total annual miles by a per mile amount approved by the state board of education.
E. Pennsylvania
According to state law, a local school board is only required to provide pupil
transportation for charter schools if the charter school is located within the district’s boundary, or located not more than ten miles by the nearest public highway beyond the district boundary, or the charter school is a regional charter school in which the district is participating.
As of February 2004, Pennsylvania law prohibits the use of 12 and 15 passenger vans for the transportation of pupils to and from school and to and from school related events.35
Pennsylvania law allows a school district to ask a pupil, regardless of age, to walk a mile and a half to either a bus stop or school.
35 This law is relaxed if the van was registered as a bus in Pennsylvania prior to March 1, 1993 or titled to a public, private, or parochial school prior to March 1, 1993 and was registered as a buss to such school prior to September 15, 1993.
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Vehicles used for less than the full school term, used only for one-way transportation (to or from school), or traveling less than 20 miles per day receive a reduced reimbursement rate.
For one-way transportation or short distances, the reimbursement is multiplied by the fraction of number of approved miles divided by 20, or the basic reimbursement is reduced by 50 percent.
For vehicles used part of the year, the annual reimbursement amount is prorated based on the portion of the term that the vehicle was in use.
The depreciation allowance for district-owned vehicles is the lesser of 10 percent of the approved purchase price or $700 per vehicles. Allowances for vehicles shared by more than one school district are prorated to each district based on annual pupil miles of service.
The school district nonpublic and charter school transportation subsidy (which is $385 per pupil)36 is distributed as follows:
• December
o 50% (approximately) of current year’s total reimbursement using nonpublic pupil count recorded on prior year’s end-of-year report
• June:
o 50% (approximately) of current year’s total reimbursement37 F. Virginia
In a controversial new law passed and signed by Governor Timothy M. Kaine, local school boards may, but are not required to decide whether or not to allow private and parochial students to ride on public school buses. If a local school board decides to transport private and parochial students to ride on public school buses, the local school board may enter into busing agreements with private schools. Such agreements may include, but are not limited to,
arrangements relating to cost-sharing, fees, insurance, and liability.
If a school board provides transportation to pupils for extracurricular activities, outside of those extracurricular activities that are not covered by an activity fund38, the school board may accept contributions for such transportation or charge each pupil using such transportation a reasonable fee not to exceed his pro rata share of the cost of providing such transportation. If the guardian or parent of a student is not financially able to pay for such transportation then the school board may, but is not required to, waive such fees. If the school board provides
transportation to pupils for field trips which are part of the program of the pupil’s school or are sponsored by such school, the school board may, but is not required to, accept contributions for such transportation.
36 This includes public school pupils transported to a charter school located outside of their district residence.
37This final reconciliation payment is calculated by subtracting the first payment from the current year’s actual total reimbursement.
38 Activity funds are funds that are sponsored by the pupils’ school apart from the regular instructional program and which the pupils are not required to attend or participate.
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To determine regular and special education transportation costs, school districts are assigned to one of six groups according to their square mileage and the average number of pupils transported daily. For each of the six cost “clusters”, a weighted average (prevailing) per pupil cost is calculated based on actual district’s expenditures and pupils transported. For the special arrangement category, only one statewide prevailing per pupil cost is calculated and applied to all districts; for the transit category, each division’s corresponding regular education prevailing per pupil amount is used.
For each school district, the applicable prevailing per pupil operational cost for each transportation category is multiplied by the projected number of pupils transported in each category to derive the projected cost for that category, adjusted for inflation. For each division, the total projected operational cost across all four categories is added to the Basic Aid account, which is paid out on a per pupil basis using a state-local share based on local ability to pay.
Funding for bus replacement is also based on a prevailing cost methodology. State funds are provided on a 12 year replacement cycle to support local bus replacement costs for regular and special education.
To determine regular and special education bus replacement costs, school districts are assigned to one of six groups according to their square mileage and the average number of pupils transported daily. For each of the six groups, a weighted average (prevailing) number of buses per 100 pupils is calculated based on actual buses reported by the districts. A unit of per 100 pupils is used to accommodate school districts with small enrollments.
For each district, the applicable prevailing number of buses per 100 pupils for regular and special education is multiplied by the projected number of regular and special education pupils in units of 100 to derive the projected prevailing number of buses for regular and special education.
The small of the prevailing or actual number of regular and special education buses is divided by 12 (as a proxy) to derived the number of buses to be replaced on a 12 year replacement cycle.
The number of buses to be replaced is multiplied by a unit cost for a standard bus configuration to derive the total bus replacement cost, adjusted for inflation. For each district, the total bus replacement cost is added to the Basic Aid account, which is paid out on a per pupil basis using a state-local share based on the composite index of local ability to pay.
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VII. Appendix B – Sample of Regression Analysis
Standard Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) Regression analysis is used to estimate the average effects of total miles traveled, percentage of service personnel who are bus drivers, time, and county-specific affects on transportation costs. Over time this method generally encourages convergence to the mean. For example, a county with unusually high transportation costs per mile traveled will receive the average allowance for counties with similar characteristics, providing an incentive to reduce costs to the mean. However, the method also allows for a county-specific effect to account for differences in factors (such as road conditions) that are unique to a county. The estimates presented below are based on the following specification:
Ln(Transportation) = α + β1Ln(Miles) + β2Ln(Bus_Operators) + β3(Year) + β4(County) + ε where Transportation represents transportation costs exclusive of salaries and Miles is the total number of miles traveled. Bus_Operators represents the percent of service personnel who are bus drivers. This variable is included to account for counties where transportation costs are a larger than average portion of total expenditures, such as a sparsely populated county. Natural logs are used to better achieve the distributional assumptions of the model. Year is a set of dummy variables for the years included in the dataset (2003 through 2007) and county represents a fixed effect for each county. Because the data include several years, County can be used as a powerful tool to account for missing control variables (such as road conditions). The county fixed effect will capture all factors that affect transportation costs within the county that do not change over time. Results for each county are summarized in the table below and indicate that on average a 10 percent increase in miles traveled results in an 11.2 percent increase in
transportation costs.
Two main factors affected the decision to focus on the above model, namely
multicolinearity amongst available control variables and fit of the model. First, other factors including number of pupils transported and number of FTE bus operators were initially included in the specification. It was determined that including these additional factors was inappropriate as the correlation factor between the additional control variables and total miles traveled was greater than 95 percent. In other words, the effects of these additional variables on transportation costs were already being captured in total miles traveled. Second, specifications were run with and without county and year effects and with a time trend. The above model was superior to the others based on standard measures of fit (R-squared) as well as examining how closely the predicted costs align with actual costs and transportation allowance amounts.
The R-squared for the above model is .96, indicating that the control variables in the model account for 96 percent of the variation in transportation costs. It was also the best performing model in terms of accurately predicting actual transportation costs. On average, the predictions are within 10.6 percent of the observed amounts over whole time period of 2003 to 2007 and the predictions became more accurate over time.
Results by county for 2007 and a comparison of 2004 transportation costs and 2005 allowances (a lag is used to account for the time lag between incurring costs and compiling the
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data) are included in Table 12. There are several counties for which the predictions are more than 20 percent less than actual costs, Wirt, Grant, and Jefferson and for which the predictions are more than 20 percent larger than actual costs, Randolph, Lincoln, Mercer, Monongalia, and Monroe. The next step toward implementing a regression methodology for allocating
transportation allowances would be to assess why the predictions are so imprecise for these counties and whether there are important control variables that need to be included in the specification.
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Results for 2007 Comparison of 2004 Cost Results and 2005 Allowances