School Committee hears about potential transportation savings

Westborough – Karen Henderson, chair of the Westborough School Committee and one of the eight members of the Transportation Subcommittee she helped create, sat at a School Committee meeting recently and just shook her head.

“I remember thinking when we began this back in September [2009],” Henderson said, referring to the Transportation Subcommittee, which has met eight times since then, “that the district’s transportation budget is about $1.1 million. Surely we’ll be able to finds lots of ways to save money in that budget.”

Such is the conundrum facing the Transportation Subcommittee – finding cost savings is much more difficul t tha n i t looke d like it would be.

“We’ve come to find out that it’s a lot more complicated than it looks at first blush,” Henderson said.

The Transportation Subcommittee reported its findings and recommendations at the School Committee’s Jan. 20 meeting and among the potential cost saving options are: consolidating bus routes and lowering the number of buses used; instituting a bus fee; and eliminating buses completely for studentsin grades seven through 12.

“We feel if we can change some stops and combine some routes where ridership is low, then we can climinate a bus, which would be a savings of about $46,000,” Dan Hendricks, the school distric’ts business director and a member of the Transporta- tion Subcommittee, said. “We believe we can make changes for next year that would eliminate one bus and maybe another down the road.”

Ilyse Levine-Kanji, a member of both the School Committee and zTransportation Subcommittee, said combining routes and eliminating buses, like seemingly everything with the transportation budget, is not as easy as it seems.

“It’s a three-tiered system,” Levine-Kanji said. “The same buses that pick up the high school then go to the middle school and then to the elementary schools. So if you’re going to combine a route and eliminate a bus, you have to combine the route on all three tiers.”

Hendricks said the subcommittee is also eyeing further cuts or the elimination of the late bus service the district provides. Down to four buses – from six last year – Hendricks said the number of late buses could be reduced even more.

In regard to bus fees, Hendricks was quick to point out that the subcommittee didn’t have a recommendation, but he did acknowledge that a $100 fee, which would be commensurate on what other local school districts charge, would generate about $130,000.

As for eliminating bus service for all students in grades seven through 12, Hendricks noted that there is not a state law requiring it, therefore it could be completely eliminated, but that – at this point – it is not an option at which the subcommittee is looking.

“There would be a substantial cost saving, sure,” Hendricks said, “but you have to look at more than that. You have to look at the responsibility the district has for getting students to and from school safely and the nightmare traffi c woul d be around the schools at dropoff and pickup time, especially dropoff time in the morning, when traffi c i n tow n i s already extremely heavy.”

School Committee member Stephen Doret implored the subcommittee to continue to look for way to find savings for the school district.

“We have to get money out of this pot,” Doret said. “This is where we have the ability to save money. This is where that savings has to come from.”