‘We need a bus’: Parents weigh in after district drops busing service for students
- Chilkat Valley News
- 6 days ago
- 7 min read
By Rashah McChesney
Chilkat Valley News
What would it take to get the Haines Borough School district to bus students to and from school this year?
That’s a question parents, students, and Haines school district employees tackled during a Monday evening meeting at the former Mosquito Lake school in the upper valley.
An estimated 30 students bus to school from in town or out the highway, and the lone bid for that contract this year came in 86 percent higher than the previous contract. After months of back-and-forth the school board voted against accepting it earlier this month, leaving those students and parents to figure out how to get to school when it starts in late August.
Since then, the district has hosted two meetings: one on Zoom on Friday night and the other in person at Mosquito Lake where many parents said it would be an extreme burden to take on transporting their kids to and from school. The route from the upper valley can be 30-40 miles of driving one way to get to Haines.
“For me, it’s just about safety,” said Stacie Powlison. “Now, I do have to make two trips every day. In the summer, so be it. I do it all summer long. But in the winter, in the dark, the weather, the roads, the avalanche – I’m terrified of having to drive into town twice a day this winter. That just puts me at so much more risk. Being forced to makes me just sick thinking about it.”
That risk is part of what made the district’s busing contractor wary of taking on the responsibility again, said Superintendent Lilly Boron.
Last year, the school district paid $139,249 to Haines Development Inc. for bus service, according to figures Boron presented during Friday’s meeting.
“We budgeted for an increase of 25% in the cost of the bus contract,” she said. “The bottom line here is the bid we received after negotiating, if you look at that — $259,000 for one year.”
Haines Development Inc. held the transportation contract for the previous five years. Owner Roger Schnabel said the company was “treading water” during the last two years of its contract, because of increased costs with insuring the buses and certifying drivers.
“It’s a tough contract. It’s a really hard contract to bid,” Schnabel said during an interview last week. “I’ve had it for five years, but I can’t say driving children up the road … is easy. It’s just so high risk.”
Schnabel and Boron said they discussed what could bring the costs down, including things like extending the length of the contract or using older buses. But, nothing significantly reduced the costs.
Ultimately, after the district rejected the contract, Boron said Schnabel didn’t want it anymore.
“He doesn’t want to be the bus provider. The liability is skyrocketing and I think it is making him nervous, honestly, as a private contractor,” she said.
But, she said, she’s had conversations with Schnabel about the possibility of leasing one or two of his buses, and that is one option for restarting bus service. There are a lot of ‘if’s’ however: including if the district can find a bus driver, or if its current liability insurance is sufficient.
To that end, Boron said she has contacted one of two people who drove that route regularly for Schnabel. “One said he’d consider it,” she said.
Parents pointed out that while the busing population of students is relatively small, they were taking on a disproportionate amount of the school district’s budget problems.
“I’m hearing that it wouldn’t be great to cut another teacher’s position to be funding this bus,” said parent Erika Merklin. “It wouldn’t be great. But that would be a hit everybody took together. This is a hit that we’re taking for the whole community. I know you’re going to come back with the numbers, but the reality is that you’re going to be disrupting families and our social, emotional and physical wellbeing for this whole community.”
Parent Jessica Plachta pointed out that some people who live in the upper valley are paying the highest mill rate in the borough.
“We’ve been paying so many taxes for so many years, I’m sure there’s a giant Christmas present just for us,” she said. “We’re waiting for our special prize, which is getting our kids to school.”
During Friday’s Zoom meeting, Christopher Nick Marquardt pointed out that the loss of busing service will also reduce the productivity of everyone involved in transporting students to and from school.
“For me, it would be up to four hours a day, depending on the weather,” he said. “We are looking at effectively decrementing the entire parental population of Haines to whatever the transportation timeline is. To me, that’s kind of an insane thing.”
When you extrapolate that loss of productivity, Marquardt said asking parents to drive their children to and from school has a huge impact.
“That’s kind of a treacherous direction to head in if we’re looking to try to fix a problem, because then we’re looking at a potentially multi-million dollar deficit in productivity to bridge a $100,000 gap … for transportation.”
Boron told parents the district gets transportation funding from the state, but uses it for all forms of pupil transportation — including field trips, renting buses, shuttle service for activities and ferry travel. Accepting a student busing contract that absorbed all of the state funding for pupil transportation would have an impact in several other areas.
Right now, the district is considering a payment-in-lieu-of option that would reimburse people who drive their kids at a per-mile rate. It’s a program that’s already in place for some families along Lutak Road where the bus route has already been discontinued due to cost.
People asked for specifics on how they’d be reimbursed for mileage, an offer known as “payment-in-lieu-of.” The reimbursement rate is calculated based on attendance.
Currently, the reimbursement rate is 40 cents a mile, which would cost the district about $84,700 a year, according to figures Boron presented. Bumping that rate up to 70 cents a mile would cost $148,200.
“Currently, we do it quarterly. We could probably change it. It’s based on attendance and the determined rate for each family,” said Judy Erekson, school district business manager during Friday’s Zoom meeting. “Then I just do the math and write a check.”
Boron and Erekson said the state provides that figure based on the distance between their home and the school. It’s not clear whether the reimbursement covers one round trip a day or two.
Merklin pushed back on the idea of those payments being a good substitute for busing.
“We can go through the math and show how everybody here is going to lose money, lose time, increase wear and tear, their insurance is going to go up, they’re going to need new tires and that’s one way into town and one way back,” she said.
Instead, Merklin and others asked if the borough could take on the responsibility of busing students.
Boron said Friday that school district representatives have met with the borough to discuss the problem. They discussed, among other things, the potential for a shuttle service.
“I think that’s a short-term solution. I’ve communicated with the lawyer to say ‘What are some interim options that are legal,’” Boron said. “We want to be safe and we want to be prudent. I think what you need to hear from me is that we are continually talking with the borough.”
Mayor Tom Morphet attended the Monday meeting in Mosquito Lake. He and Boron noted that the state could consider any borough help with transportation could count toward the capped amount it’s allowed to give to the district.
That’s because of a proposed rule change from the state’s Department of Education and Early Development, wherein non-instructional expenses that have generally not been counted toward that cap – things like transportation – would now be included.
That rule change has not yet made it through; the State’s Board of Education will be considering the proposed rule during its next meeting Oct. 8-9.
To get around that issue, school district administrative assistant Tiana Perry-Traudt asked if the borough could bid for the busing contract.
“You would bid as a contractor,” she said. “It would be a way of doing it without – in kind. There’d be a contracted service.”
Others during Monday’s meeting asked if any of the local guiding companies that are ferrying tourists around in buses could take on the responsibility.
But Perry-Traudt said the district can’t just use any bus in town.
“They have to be yellow. It’s federal regulation,” she said. “They have to have a blinker on top and a stop arm. And there’s also other safety measures on a school bus that a tour bus might not have, like the solid plywood floor, the safety chassis. You can’t just pull a bus off the road and say you’re going to be a school bus.”
Boron said Friday that she also planned to reach out to the Chilkoot Indian Association, which may also have some transportation funds.
“Ultimately, this is a school issue and we’re not going to try to pass off to anybody,” she said.
Merklin told Boron she was nervous that all of the conversations about solutions would go nowhere once they got to the school board level.
“Are you advocating for us?” she said. “I’m feeling like I’m going into this meeting and it’s like ‘if the budget’s right and if we’re able to fit it into – feasibly – within this budget.’ We need a bus. It’s unfortunate that it’s unfeasible because everything is going up, but … we just need a bus.”
Boron encouraged parents to call or email her with questions and ideas. She also headed to Juneau this week for the annual Alaska Superintendents Association meeting and said she planned to confer with other school districts who are in a similar position.
She also encouraged parents to attend the next Haines Borough School Board meeting and weigh in. That’s on Tuesday, Aug. 5, at 6:30 p.m.
• This story was originally published by the Chilkat Valley News.
