A friend of ours said today that she has to pay $185 per kid per semester to have them ride the school bus. We asked if this was because she lives to close to the school or something, and she said that wasn’t it–everyone has to pay to ride the bus in this school district.
Is this normal? :eek:
-Kris
I know that my parents paid about that much when I was in school in the mid eighties and ninties. We had a pass that proved our parents had paid. If you didn’t have it you couldn’t get on the bus. I believe they got a break on each additional kid, but it was not cheap. I distinctly recall hearing my parents discuss it. I grew up in Northern California by the way.
Mom had to for two years. It gets paid for by somebody in the end, so collecting from each rider isn’t a bizarre way to pay for the service.
We’re in the CPS (Chicago Public School) system, and there are no school buses at all. Students use the CTA buses if they want. I think they can get a discounted pass, and perhaps even a free one if their income level is low enough, but no, the school system doesn’t pay to transport your kid anymore.
Some suburban districts still do, but of course they’re eating into their budget to do it. The kids might have “free” buses, but they don’t get PE everyday and their art education might be nil. I think I actually prefer the burden for busing being directly borne by the busees.
Unless we’re talking a place where it’s more than a 3 mile walk to school, I think we’d be healthier as a nation if we made them walk, anyhow. There’s just no reason healthy kids need to be bussed for short distances while we’re wailing about childhood obesity rates! If they need more crossing guards for dangerous intersections or areas of sidewalk put in so they can keep off my lawn 
, that seems like a wiser use of public funds to me.
I went to high school in an upper class town that had plenty of taxes to support the school system… Unfortunately, the government decided to enact a “Robin Hood” law and many of our school’s funds were diverted to the poorer surrounding schools. The result was kids in our district having to pay for virtually everything, including school buses and even to play sports. It’s not unheard of, but kinda ridiculous (and very hated amongst everyone in our school district).
Paying for transportation doesn’t even scratch the surface.
One school district close to Nashville hasn’t been able to open schools yet. Not enough money. Some teachers are volunteering to lower their salaries so that other teachers don’t have to leave.
In another school district, children have been asked to supply toliet paper. Yes, it has gotten that bad.
Teachers have been buying supplies out of their own pockets for years.
My school bussed for free. It covers a wide area though, so walking would’ve taken over an hour. In the past, there were 4 different schools for the same neighborhoods. If you bus your kids at all, you’re lucky. It means the school it able to accomodate a lot of kids and they’re therefore saving money in the economies-of-scale type way.
At my (private) high school, we could pay to ride the school busses, or buy tickets for public transportation at a discount. I don’t know what the bus fee was, but in my case it was cheaper to take the train (I lived way the heck on the other side of town).
After a few incidents involving students walking to or from the train station (a couple of blocks away), the school started letting kids ride the school busses as far as the next station over (in a better neighborhood) for no charge.
I’ve never heard of that! Here in WV we have free buses unless you live really close. I don’t know what the exact distance would be – when I lived 3 blocks from my elementary school I walked and there were safety patrols at the intersections.
When I was in 4th and 5th grade I went to private school. There was some thing (a law? I don’t know, I was just 9!) that said if you lived over 2 miles from the private school you got something back for busing. I ought to ask my mom if it was a tax break or what exactly it was. I just remember that we measured it and we lived exactly 2.1 miles from the school. It had something to do with us paying taxes for the busing but not using them since we went to private school. It didn’t make sense to us then, and doesn’t now either.
Our school system has introduced another burden on the teachers as of last year. We now are required to provide school supplies for the kids. I can recommend things for my classes, but I can’t require even pencil and paper. When school starts next week we can say something like “I recommend you have a notebook (or binder or whatever) and writing utensils and fill in the blank for what you need”, but any kid who doesn’t have any of this can not be penalized in any way. I have to keep extra pencils and paper ready at all. I have to be ready to supply anything required – composition notebooks in English, calculators in Math, and so forth. You see, sending home those lists of school supplies for kids does not constitute a “Free Education for all”. I have no problem helping kids with financial difficulties, but I went through boxes and boxes of pencils and ream after ream of paper last year – and teachers were not given any more money to spend on supplies!
The American system of the schools themselves paying for/providing bus transport is one of those few things that strikes me as very foreign. I don’t know enough about it to say yea or nay to it, but I seem to hear a lot of stories of schools having trouble financing it.
The situation in Australia (in my state at least) is that the state government contracts local bus companies to provide the daily school bus service (individual school administrations are spared the hassles of providing this themselves). Children living more than 1.6km (1 mile) from school via the shortest route are issued with a bus pass entitling them to free travel to and from school. If there is a bus available, kids living less than that distance will pay a small cash fare to the driver (the idea being that the little sods should be walking).
The Free Student Travel Scheme (as I think it’s called) only provides regular to and from school service, and other stuff like sporting events needs to be paid for by the school or the parents. The schools neither employ drivers nor own buses (some wealthy private schools excepted).
I grew up in the northwest suburbs of Chicago, and we could either walk, ride a bike or pay to ride a mass transit bus* to get to and from school.
IIRC, at the time, fare was 25 cents, and the routes were special school service routes - it’s not like in San Francisco now, where kids will have a Fast Pass and hop on the #14 bus then transfer to the #49 or whatever regular routes.
Northern California here and we’d pay about $135 to have the girl bussed to and from school for the semester. I think there are reduced rates based upon income…
This happened with both of our sons. Here, if a child lives more than 2 km away from the school for first grade, or 4 km for second grade on up, the municipality is supposed to provide the option of bus service. We live a little over 2 km away from the private elementary school our boys attend, but the school is far too small and the pupils too scattered to make bus service a reasonable possibility. So the municipality reimbursed us for transporting our first graders. I think they used the same per-kilometer rates they use for municipal employees using their private cars on official business.
I asked my mom yesterday about the private school bus reimbursement. She said they actually got a check back every 3 months, and it was around $140-ish. I don’t know if she got more because she had 3 kids or if everyone got the same rate regardless of number of children. It only happened for one year, because after that there were lots of complaints made by people who didn’t have children at all – they were paying busing taxes and not getting a rebate either! It was a pretty stupid idea. I mean, it’s the parent’s choice to send the kid to private school, so the government shouldn’t have to reimburse them for transportation.
We had to pay for the school bus when I was in High School (until I learned to drive and got a car when I was 16), but the school buses were run by the City Council and would accept the same multi-trip tickets and monthly passes used on the rest of the bus routes, which was actually quite handy as it was basically the only way to get around town if you didn’t have a car…
I walked (Brisbane Australia). My Mum told me that when she went to school the three kids riding the one horse was absolutely free.
When my son went to pubic in Alabama the bus was free but we were ineligible to ride it because we lived less than 2 miles from the school.
Now that we are in private in MS, we pay. Oh yes, we pay. A couple weeks ago we wrote a check for $700 to cover the year. The first week we were asked to provide either water bottles or money to buy them. And I am sure that is just the beginning…
When I started kindergarten (all of the following is in north suburban Chicago), it was 2 blocks from home and we walked. A couple of months into the year, Mom had me switched to the local magnet school (long story involving the neighborhood school telling me I was not allowed to read in class), which was maybe 3 miles away, and the school district bussed me - I believe it was free.
For middle school, I went to the neighborhood school, which was about half a mile away, and we walked. The high school didn’t run buses, but we were perfectly able to take regular city buses; the one that stopped half a block out our back door went to the high school, so that was easy.
We did have lists of “recommended” school supplies, and later on things like gym uniforms, but I believe there were subsidies for low-income kids.
Oh, the difference a state makes! Not only do we have school supply lists, but the high school sends home a list of fees as long as my arm:
*Standard Fee…all students must pay this fee…$75
Additional fees/items
and so on, down to 18.
Not every kid incurs every fee, much of it is based on the classes chosen by the students. It’s not on this year’s form, but last years had a disclaimer printed on it listing the state statute somethingorother which declared these fees and others not to be violating a “free education for all”.
This is just about the only form that comes home that doesn’t have a low-income slide or waiver with it. But I did notice last year that they were excrutiatingly polite about attempting to collect. For various reasons, I didn’t pay right away, and then honestly forgot about it. It wasn’t until the end of first semester when I went to pick up his grades that they very meekly said, “Oh, and here’s a list of his outstanding fees - but you don’t have to pay them today or anything, just…here they are.” - So that makes me wonder if they’re not on very slippery legal ground to ask for them, and no grounds to demand them. Either way, I’m a good sport and I can afford it, so I paid right there and then.
And yes, gotpasswords, PACE is the “surburban” bus system, but its routes include a bit of Chicago proper.
IIRC (and it’s quite possible that I don’t!) the school board I went to owns and operates it’s own buses, rather than contracting them out. As part of that, they have more freedom to adapt the bus routes every year to get out to where the actually enrolled students live in order to bus them in. I think there was a 1km minimum, and people living inside that had to walk, but I also know that there were exceptions made for certain weather conditions, such as heavy snowfall. There were crossing guards everywhere too.
And IIRC, this was “free”, in the sense that it was paid for via your school taxes, which are collected yearly from homeowners in the school board area in addition to the regular municipal taxes.
I don’t remember much of how it worked in elementary school, since my mom was a teacher and we’d usually just go in with her when we were little, and for the last three years I was in Germany, and the Canadian Forces paid for the schools and buses! For high school, though, there are only 3 high schools in the school board, all of them “regional”, so you’d have students coming in from up to 2 hours away by bus every day. As I said, having their own buses and routes tailored to the location of actual students was useful, because the bus might go out and get one person in town A, then a set of siblings in town B, then drive 20 minutes before getting someone else in town C, etc.