School buses' vacant seats costing Hub

Issues frustrate call to end waste

A yellow bus pulled up at Mission Hill School one day last week and released five students bundled in hats, mittens, and puffy jackets. Then came another bus with only four students. By morning's end, 10 buses had pulled up at the Roxbury school, dropping off about 40 students in total. Two buses ferried only one student.

This scene plays out at schools across Boston each morning, with more than half of the buses arriving at their destinations at least half-empty, at a time when the district is facing a $100 million shortfall that could lead to layoffs and increased class sizes. On about a quarter of the trips each day, the buses are no more than a quarter full, according to school department data requested by the Globe.

Empty seats appear to have grown more prevalent since city watchdogs first raised alarms about it more than a decade ago. The district is transporting 31,493 students this year - 5,000 fewer than it did 10 years ago - and yet the district is using only five fewer buses.

In last year's State of the City address, Mayor Thomas M. Menino vowed to take on the problem and stop pouring "dollar after dollar" into gas tanks instead of classrooms. The goal was to cut $10 million out of the district's $76 million transportation budget, which has grown by $16 million over the past five years and now makes up about 9 percent of school spending.

But Superintendent Carol R. Johnson's modest effort to keep more children closer to home this fall failed under opposition from advocates who believed it would prevent disadvantaged students from seeking better schools in other parts of the city. And this year, Menino made no mention of empty buses in his annual address.

"Do we need to do more? Yes," Johnson said. "It's just not sustainable for us to spend the amount of dollars we are in nonacademic areas and not put teachers in the classrooms."

Menino acknowledged Friday that there is a problem.

"Four kids on a bus is a waste of money," he said.

But the mayor said it will be difficult to improve the bus system until all neighborhoods have quality schools, cutting down on the number of children who must travel across town.

"I always said I wanted to reduce transportation spending and put the money in the classrooms," Menino said. "I'm trying to work on those issues. It's a difficult time."

At the heart of the problem are the city's three sprawling student assignment zones, established 20 years ago to replace a court-created desegregation plan. The system allows students in South Boston, for instance, to travel as far as Hyde Park to attend their school of choice, or students from East Boston to travel to Brighton. But the choice comes at a cost: There are often only a few children at any given bus stop going to the same destination, and the buses do not have time to make many other stops if they want to get children to a distant school on time.

When the system was designed, the idea was to expand into nine zones in a few years as schools improved, enabling families to find quality schools closer to home and reduce transportation costs.

But broad improvement never happened and the zones have remained massive, requiring buses to sometimes snake through 10 miles of cramped neighborhood streets in rush hour traffic. The broad dispersal of students plays out each morning in the area of Geneva Avenue and Westville Street in Dorchester, where 46 buses whisk away 369 students to nearly four dozen schools across the city.

With the school district now facing a dire financial situation, school leaders plan to refocus on transportation spending, but every possible solution is rife with the same political obstacles that have stymied changes in the past.

A return to neighborhood schools - long advocated by some city councilors and many parents - runs against the desire of parents who want to increase the number of available choices.

"Within every plan there are embedded hundreds of issues that make a difference in people's lives," said Neil Sullivan, executive director of the Private Industry Council, who was part of the city team that created the three-zone system. "You have to make sure that something as sensitive as where children go to school doesn't become a political football, and we have failed miserably at that through the years."

Richard Jacobs, the system's transportation director, said time constraints drive the use of buses, in addition to the complex school choice system. The district has three different starting times - in most cases determined by grade level - that are an hour apart, beginning at 7:25 a.m. As soon as buses drop off students on the first round, they turn around and start another route.

"We always strive to be more efficient, but I believe we do an excellent job, given the demands this city presents," Jacobs said. "It's a difficult city to move around in."

He said the system uses its buses efficiently, by maximizing the number of routes each bus completes each day. He noted a survey by the Council of the Great City Schools that found that Boston had the second-highest utilization rate, at 5.9 routes per bus per day, well above a national median of 3.9 routes.

However, the council also found that Boston runs one of the more expensive busing systems, with transportation consuming 9.3 percent of the schools' $833 million operating budget, compared with a national median of 4.3 percent.

Many government watchdogs expected Menino's public vow for change last year to set off a formal process, including the hiring of consultants and soliciting public opinion, but that never happened. Instead, the district pursued smaller savings through school consolidations and closures, combining bus stops, and identifying special education students who no longer required door-to-door pick-up and drop-off.

But even those smaller changes - which should save $1.7 million in transportation spending next year - spurred controversy, with some parents feeling their schools were unfairly singled out.

In an attempt to decrease the number of nearly empty buses arriving at Mission Hill School, Johnson decided in the fall to no longer allow the school to enroll new students from across the city, leaving it to draw just from its territory in the north zone. Mission Hill was one of three lower grade schools with citywide status that she switched to zone schools. (All high schools enroll students citywide.)

Overhauling the district's transportation system could become contentious during this election year. City Councilor Michael Flaherty, who announced a mayoral run last week, said that the school's busing system is an example of city government inefficiency and needs to be addressed.

"Wasting precious dollars on empty buses is unacceptable," said Flaherty, who drives his children to a public school in Dorchester.

The Rev. Gregory Groover, the School Committee's new chairman, said the board in the coming months will reexamine a report completed five years ago during the last effort to reduce transportation spending.

That report included eight proposals, such as creating more neighborhood schools, making all schools citywide, and maintaining three zones but with different boundaries. But concerns over a lack of quality schools in some neighborhoods prompted the School Committee to make only minor changes.

In order for any plan to succeed, though, the process will have to be conducted in public, even though it may generate polarizing debates, said John Mudd, senior project director for the Massachusetts Advocates for Children, a nonprofit working on behalf of disadvantaged children.

"There is going to be a natural interest for everyone to leap back and protect their own turf," Mudd said. "How do we get beyond that as a community?"

James Vaznis can be reached at jvaznis@globe.com.