Citing high costs, Haines school district suspends bus service
- Chilkat Valley News
- Jul 24
- 5 min read
By Rashah McChesney
Chilkat Valley News
With less than a month before the first day of school, up to 30 students who normally rely on a bus will have to find other ways to get to and from the Haines School.
That announcement came this week as Superintendent Lilly Boron started calling families who use the bus to let them know the district would not be busing students during the upcoming academic year.
It’s a decision parents like Jessica Plachta said will likely lead to higher rates of absenteeism.
“This is absolutely an equity issue,” she said. “There are kids in the Upper Valley who will not go to school if they cannot get bused to school.”
The proposal
School district officials and the school board made the decision to drop efforts to secure a transportation contract after a special July 7 meeting, citing the cost.
The school district put out a request for proposals in mid-January, looking for a five-year contract. The sole bid came in April 29 at just about $250,000 from Haines Development Inc., which held the transportation contract for the previous five years.
Owner Roger Schnabel described the transportation contract as “challenging” and “stressful” and said the company was hit hard by increased costs during the last two years of its contract.
“The two biggest items that hit us were insurance for insuring the buses and that is astronomical when you consider the risk to the underwriter. It became an even bigger issue, to the point where our agent had to scramble to get coverage,” he said. “The other item that hit us hard was the driver credentials and what it takes to certify drivers.”
Schnabel said the company has had a hard time finding drivers and five years ago the cost was negligible to get them certified.
“Now, for a certified driver we’re looking at right about $13,000. That’s without paying the potential driver wages to get through the certification,” he said. “That was tough.”
Boron said the district worked with Schnabel to adjust the contract terms to bring the costs down. Boron said they looked at using an older bus, reducing down to just one route, or reducing the contract length to a year. Nothing seemed to make a measurable amount of difference.
“It turned into quite an ordeal,” Schnabel said. “But the district — I think — did a very good job of trying to do whatever they could to cut costs. It seemed like every change they made didn’t help as much as they were hoping.”
Ultimately, it was going to cost somewhere in the range of $1,345 to $1,810 a day, or about $250,000 for the year, to drive students to and from school, according to figures from the latest contract proposal the school board was considering.
A statewide issue
That cost would have consumed the district’s entire projected pupil transportation grant from the Alaska Department of Education & Early Development. Haines’ projected grant for the 2025-26 school year would be between $158,000-$167,000.
The school’s transportation fund is used for bussing students to and from school and transporting students to activities, which is budgeted at about $67,000 this year according to a pupil transportation sheet presented to the school board this month. It also pays for maintenance on some district vehicles.
“It sort of obliterates that budget,” said school board president Michelle Sloper.
She said part of the problem is that the state hasn’t been meeting school district needs for student transportation for a long time and the Haines Borough School District isn’t the only one struggling with pupil transportation costs.
Department of Education state transportation director Lori Weed did not respond to a phone call and email asking questions about the scale of the problem statewide as of press time.
But according to the nonprofit Alaska Council of School Administrators, transportation funding for students hasn’t increased since 2016, while costs have increased by nearly 40% during that same time period.
According to a position statement from the council, statewide transportation costs have exceeded the amount of state pupil transportation funding by more than $44.4 million.
The higher costs come during what Sloper called a “challenging budget year.”
At the state level, Gov. Mike Dunleavy vetoed more than $50 million in education funding earlier this summer, though lawmakers could still override that veto during a special session in August. At the federal level, the Trump administration currently has about $5 billion in education funding for teacher training, migrant education, English language learning, and academic enrichment frozen. A group of districts in the state have sued over that decision.
Sloper said she’s heard of some districts having to choose between busing or school lunch programs.
“It’s really terrible trade-offs that we’re dealing with right now,” Sloper said.
Looking ahead
Boron said a lot of things are still being worked out, but one thing the district plans to do is reimburse parents who live more than a mile and a half from school for the cost of transporting their students. Right now, that rate is set at about .40 cents per mile.
But Boron said she’s working with the school board to get that figure closer to the federal mileage reimbursement rate for businesses which is 70 cents per mile, according to the IRS. That would cost the district about $148,000 a year, she said.
Both Sloper and Boron said they’re hoping to drop busing for just one year and come up with a workable solution for the next. But anything that involves transporting students is subject to state and federal regulations.
“Every student is important and every student needs to be able to get to school,” Boron said. “This is a very hard problem to have and we are going to think of every way feasible to get students to school in a safe and legal manner.”
Boron said she asked the Chatham School District if it would be willing to transport some students and get reimbursed by Haines. She’s also considered some kind of assistance for families who don’t have a vehicle. Another idea was using vans to transport students to and from school and leaving buses out of the equation, but Boron said the state’s Department of Education told her that would not be legal.
Sloper suggested that the Haines Borough— which has already funded the school district to the maximum extent possible allowed under state law — could run a shuttle service for students, separate from the school district.
Boron said she’s planning to host a Zoom meeting with families that use the bus service and is open to solutions and ideas.
In the meantime, Plachta said she would like to see the district prioritize getting kids to school over funding travel for activities.
She said she already drives her son to school in the mornings because she works in Haines. She spends about $50 a week on gas and it can take an hour to get into town.
“Winters are harrowing sometimes, getting up and down [the Haines Highway], she said. “I’m fortunate, I have a car with four-wheel-drive and studded tires.”
The lack of busing means she’ll likely have to leave work early to pick her son up.
“It would cut into my work schedule absolutely,” she said. “But at least it’s doable for me. There are parents who it is absolutely not viable for, parents without reliable vehicles, parents who can’t afford it.”
• This story was originally published by the Chilkat Valley News. The Chilkat Valley News’ editorial intern Chisel Triezenberg contributed to this story.
