Post by bennyp81 on Jun 20, 2005 6:41:57 GMT -8
Roberto
User ID: 9161143 Feb 9th 8:13 AM
From Daily Breeze
February 9, 2003
**********
LAST STOP FOR SCHOOL BUSES?
SOUTH BAY: The once ubiquitous part of almost every student’s life is fading into memory as more area districts quit offering transportation.
By Renee Moilanen
DAILY BREEZE
Think back to your school days, when each bleary-eyed morning began in the same way: standing on the street corner, craning your neck above traffic, waiting for that long yellow school bus to trundle up the road.
Remember the groan of the brakes as it pulled to a stop. Recall the belch of black exhaust fumes, the crunchy feel of vinyl seats.
For many, riding the bus was as much a part of the school experience as dusty chalkboards, brown-sack lunches and playing hopscotch at recess.
Not anymore.
Just 14 percent of California students ride the bus to and from school each day (16 percent if you count special needs children, who are entitled to bus transportation), compared with 54 percent of students nationwide. Though state officials don’t have records from the 1950s, when school buses were everywhere, they say there are fewer California kids riding the yellow bus now than at any other time in the last few decades.
Around here, only the Torrance Unified School District still offers bus transportation for all children, and that means a whole generation of California kids may grow up without knowing the yellow school bus.
“Twenty years ago, it was pretty common to drive through the neighborhood and see kids walking in every direction to the bus stop,” said Bob Austin, a coordinator at the state’s Office of School Transportation.
“Nowadays, parents don’t feel comfortable doing that,” he said. “If they’re going to drive them to the bus stop, they may as well drive them to school.”
But it’s not just the reluctance of people to swap cars for mass transit that has stemmed the number of school bus riders.
The biggest factor is cost.
It’s simply too expensive for school districts to give bus rides to all students. The state pays only half of the estimated $1 billion spent each year on bus transportation, forcing districts to drain their general funds to cover the difference.
And since the state doesn’t mandate it, well, there’s not much incentive to offer it.
“There isn’t a district in the state that would not be delighted to provide adequate yellow school bus service,” Austin said. “But for the district, it’s a choice of, do you put teachers in the classrooms or a bus on the road?”
The Manhattan Beach Unified School District grappled with this very question when it scrapped its middle school bus program in September.
For years, the district bused students living west of Sepulveda Boulevard to Manhattan Beach Middle School, fearing it was too dangerous to let children cross the busy road.
But the district’s $440 yearly student bus fee didn’t come close to covering the costs, and soon, the program was siphoning $200,000 a year from the already lean general fund, deputy Superintendent Scott Smith said.
That didn’t include the hours spent dealing with lost bus passes, kids who didn’t get to the bus stop on time and the discipline problems that inevitably erupted with dozens of rambunctious middle-schoolers crammed into small quarters.
Then there were the angry calls from neighbors, who complained about black exhaust fumes and rumbling engines so early in the morning.
“We had 10 or 12 reasons why we were cutting it,” Smith said.
“We had a choice of money going into busing or money going into the classroom,” he said. “It’s a pretty clear choice.”
Parents didn’t take the decision lightly.
“Some of our parents are dual working parents, and the times they have to leave the home are before or after their children do,” said Lauren Burton, president of the Manhattan Beach Middle School PTA, which opposed the decision. “They had come to rely upon this service.”
Parents offered to pick up the tab for bus service, but the district declined, because the arrangement still wouldn’t have solved problems with liability, misbehaving students or neighborhood complaints.
So the PTA enticed MTA to provide a public bus route just for Manhattan Beach middle-schoolers. Parents pay $20 a month, the children get where they need to go and the district doesn’t have to worry about a thing.
“It’s had its ups and downs, but overall, people are pretty happy at this point,” Burton said.
But is it the same as the little yellow bus?
Not exactly, students say.
The MTA bus is marked with graffiti, and the neat orderly rows of the school bus are replaced by rigid seats facing each other. And, of course, “it’s not yellow,” says seventh-grader David Whinfrey.
Then there are the MTA bus drivers, who change from day to day.
“I think it’s easier to get on the school bus, because the bus driver always recognizes you,” says seventh-grader Evan Olson, who rode the yellow bus last year.
“The bus driver knew us by name,” recalls seventh-grader Stewart Crichton.
School buses didn’t always cause this kind of trouble for schools.
In the 1940s and 50s, the yellow buses were all the rage, winding down rural roads and through budding suburban subdivisions. At the time, one-room schoolhouses still dotted California’s rural landscape, much to the dismay of the Department of Education, which wanted larger school districts to benefit from economies of scale.
To get school districts to consolidate, the state offered financial incentives — extra funding for poor areas, money to replace aging buses — so school systems would transport students into more centralized campuses.
Everything worked fine. Until 1978.
That’s when Proposition 13 passed, radically limiting education funds and forcing the state to put a cap on its transportation spending. The state no longer paid to replace old buses. Nor did it keep up with rising transportation costs, like salaries or gas prices.
Today, “either districts come up with the money out of their general fund or they reduce their service,” Austin says.
That’s why only a few districts still offer the yellow buses. Torrance offers it for every child, but other school systems — Hawthorne, Lawndale and the Los Angeles Unified School District — transport regular education students only from overcrowded schools.
Still, even in Torrance, students aren’t lining up for bus rides.
Roughly 900 children — less than 4 percent of the district’s enrollment — ride the bus each day, not counting the 600 or so special education students.
Some schools have just a handful of bus riders, maybe five or six on a 70-passenger bus, said Mike Culver, transportation manager. Seaside Elementary School has just one child who takes the bus.
The district fills the empty seats by lumping together special education and regular students and using one bus to make a couple of stops, so it’s rare to see only a few heads peeking out the windows.
But the cost is still a headache. The buses drain about $1.2 million from the district’s $160 million general fund each year. The yearly $220 student bus fee doesn’t cut it — Torrance officials say it costs $50,000 to $60,000 a year to operate a school bus, and the Office of School Transportation puts the average costs of transporting a child to school at $987.
“It’s just a subsidy,” Culver says of the bus pass.
If the district wanted to make the bus system more efficient, it could reduce the number of bus stops, but that might scare away the few student riders it has, Culver says. Ridership dropped about 10 percent when the district started charging bus fees in the early 1990s.
And if the 21-square-mile district ditched the bus system entirely, many students would face long walks and busy roads.
“In this city, there are a lot of places where (buses are) important for safety reasons,” said Kevin Condon, Torrance chief business officer. “The city doesn’t have a lot of crossing guards.”
“If you have a small city with a school in every neighborhood, nobody has to walk more than a mile to school,” he added.
Still, in car-loving, cash-strapped California, school buses aren’t likely to make a comeback.
When the afternoon bell rings, school parking lots are choked with impatient parents honking horns and curbs lined with cars.
“People in California like to do things themselves,” Culver jokes.
John
User ID: 9510053 Feb 9th 11:05 AM
I think it would be very pleasing to see fewer and fewer school buses and more and more MTA buses on the streets!
Roberto
User ID: 9161143 Apr 25th 3:14 AM
From Daily News
April 24, 2003
******
'Green' bidders win school bus routes
By Helen Gao
Staff Writer
Despite intense lobbying from the Teamsters union and San Fernando Valley business leaders, the Los Angeles school board rejected the bid Thursday of its main bus-service provider, instead agreeing to spend $1 million extra a year to put kids in "green" diesel buses.
The decision likely will lead to layoffs of 300 bus drivers, mechanics and other support staffers, including many at Laidlaw Transit Inc.'s facilities in Canoga Park and Tujunga, where it operates a fleet of 350 older diesel buses.
Laidlaw, the lowest bidder at $37.5 million to serve 258 routes for three years with conventional diesel buses, was backed by the Valley Industry and Commerce Association and Teamsters Local 572. The company had also hired Fleishman Hillard, a politically connected communications firm, to lobby on its behalf.
Despite facing a budget crunch, the board unanimously chose First Student Inc. and Cardinal Transportation Group Inc. for a $67.5 million, five-year contract.
First Student plans to invest $18.5 million to buy "green" diesel buses, with traps for minute particles of pollution, that would emit significantly lower quantities of these particulates than Laidlaw's conventional diesel fleet does.
"It's better for the kids to have a new bus to ride on, with the latest emission controls in it," said Antonio Rodriguez, director of transportation for the Los Angeles Unified School District.
"I am looking at a brand new bus for $10 more a day roughly. Yeah, it's more money, but the environmental impact on the kids is worth it. It's not all about bucks."
According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, children who ride a conventional diesel school bus for an hour or two every day are being exposed to as much as 46 times the cancer risk deemed acceptable by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. A representative from the environmental group told the board the pollution level inside a school bus is four times higher than outside.
"In a financial-crisis situation, we are shocked the district would award (the contract to higher bidders) under this kind of scenario," said James Ferraro, area vice president for Laidlaw, which has provided transportation service to the district for 18 years.
He added that the company has plans to acquire buses running on "clean" compressed natural gas as it retires old vehicles.
But school district officials said their decision to contract with the higher bidders makes business sense. Laidlaw now operates 640 routes for the LAUSD, or 57 percent of the routes that are under contract. The district also has its own fleet.
When Laidlaw bus drivers went on strike last April to demand higher wages, more than 75,000 students were stranded, and district officials scrambled to provide interim transportation. Even with losing the contract for 258 routes, Laidlaw remains the primary transportation provider for the district, serving 528 routes.
"The distribution of contracts is advantageous to the district so it's not over-reliant on one contractor," said LAUSD business manager Michael Eugene.
Rodriguez said Laidlaw is not adequately staffed to handle its contracted workload. On any given day, he said, district officials must send nine to 10 buses to cover for Laidlaw, which has not been able to meet the contract requirement to have extra buses and staffers on hand to handle contingencies.
School board member Marlene Canter said kids in her district have missed first and second periods because Laidlaw buses didn't show up.
"They promised more than they can deliver," said Canter.
In Laidlaw's defense, Ferraro said the district has hired away some 300 bus drivers from the company in the past three years, resulting in a constant struggle for Laidlaw to recruit and train new ones.
When news spread that the district procurement staff recommended against its bid, Laidlaw mounted an aggressive campaign employing Fleishman Hillard, which helped the district pass its $3.35 billion school construction bond last November. Board members said they received several e-mails and letters.
District spokeswoman Stephanie Brady said Fleishman Hillard is not currently a district consultant.
Fred Gaines, VICA board chairman, wrote a letter in support of Laidlaw.
"Laidlaw Education has provided the LAUSD with reliable, safe and cost-effective service for many years," he wrote.
"Combined with Laidlaw Education's strong commitment to the civic community in Los Angeles, the company employs 725 hard-working men and women whose livelihoods would be greatly impacted by the staff decision."
Lonnie Holmes, business representative for Teamsters Local 572, said his members would be hit hard.
"We've got a lot of single-parent bus drivers who make their living off Laidlaw," he said. "Laidlaw has provided good wages and benefits to those single parents."
Bart Reed
User ID: 1606604 Apr 25th 9:02 AM
The above Daily News story was from Friday, 04/25
Los Angeles Times: Friday, April 25, 2003
School Bus Pact Awarded to Rival
By Solomon Moore
Times Staff Writer
One year after a monthlong bus drivers' strike against Laidlaw Education Services that stranded thousands of schoolchildren, the Los Angeles Board of Education voted Thursday to give a third of that company's routes to a competitor.
The board voted 5 to 1, with Jose Huizar voting against and Julie Korenstein abstaining, to give 250 routes to the Cincinnati-based First Student bus company, for at least five years at a cost of $12 million.
Officials at the Los Angeles Unified School Dis-trict said the strike prompted them to further diversify the district's bus contractors. They were also displeased by Laidlaw's service, accord-ing to a confidential memo obtained by The Times.
"Laidlaw's performance has been poor," the memo stated. Laidlaw failed to cover some of its 786 routes and in-house district drivers have had to pick up the slack. A reduction in Laidlaw's routes, the memo said, "will help Laidlaw improve its performance and become a successful vendor for the district."
But Laidlaw Vice President Jim Ferraro complained that his company had some problems because the district kept hiring away drivers. "They've taken 300 of our drivers away over the last four years," he said.
The Teamsters union, which had struck Laidlaw, has complained that First Student employs non-union drivers. But district officials said that is not why the new contract was awarded and that Thursday's vote should not be seen as anti-union.
Most board members and district staffers argued that, beyond questions about its performance, Laidlaw offered a less attractive contract proposal.
Bidders were asked to submit plans for three- and five-year contracts for buses with reduced emissions. Laidlaw offered a three-year proposal for older, regular diesel buses. First Student's proposal also was for diesel buses, but with sulfur caps that reduce air pollution.
A 2001 study of California school buses found that children riding inside a diesel bus are exposed to four times the level of toxic fumes as someone riding in a car behind that bus.
Þ=+Þ+=Þ
Dane
User ID: 1878484 Apr 25th 2:49 PM
It's interesting how, 25 years ago, everyone against Prop. 13 was alarmist, or just plain misinformed. My parents were not fond of property tax levels back then, but even they could see the writing on the wall of the effects of Prop. 13 on education, and we were directly effected the next summer when my Summer School session was cancelled due to lack of funds. Needless to say, it's been a frustrating juggling act for school districts since then.
User ID: 9161143 Feb 9th 8:13 AM
From Daily Breeze
February 9, 2003
**********
LAST STOP FOR SCHOOL BUSES?
SOUTH BAY: The once ubiquitous part of almost every student’s life is fading into memory as more area districts quit offering transportation.
By Renee Moilanen
DAILY BREEZE
Think back to your school days, when each bleary-eyed morning began in the same way: standing on the street corner, craning your neck above traffic, waiting for that long yellow school bus to trundle up the road.
Remember the groan of the brakes as it pulled to a stop. Recall the belch of black exhaust fumes, the crunchy feel of vinyl seats.
For many, riding the bus was as much a part of the school experience as dusty chalkboards, brown-sack lunches and playing hopscotch at recess.
Not anymore.
Just 14 percent of California students ride the bus to and from school each day (16 percent if you count special needs children, who are entitled to bus transportation), compared with 54 percent of students nationwide. Though state officials don’t have records from the 1950s, when school buses were everywhere, they say there are fewer California kids riding the yellow bus now than at any other time in the last few decades.
Around here, only the Torrance Unified School District still offers bus transportation for all children, and that means a whole generation of California kids may grow up without knowing the yellow school bus.
“Twenty years ago, it was pretty common to drive through the neighborhood and see kids walking in every direction to the bus stop,” said Bob Austin, a coordinator at the state’s Office of School Transportation.
“Nowadays, parents don’t feel comfortable doing that,” he said. “If they’re going to drive them to the bus stop, they may as well drive them to school.”
But it’s not just the reluctance of people to swap cars for mass transit that has stemmed the number of school bus riders.
The biggest factor is cost.
It’s simply too expensive for school districts to give bus rides to all students. The state pays only half of the estimated $1 billion spent each year on bus transportation, forcing districts to drain their general funds to cover the difference.
And since the state doesn’t mandate it, well, there’s not much incentive to offer it.
“There isn’t a district in the state that would not be delighted to provide adequate yellow school bus service,” Austin said. “But for the district, it’s a choice of, do you put teachers in the classrooms or a bus on the road?”
The Manhattan Beach Unified School District grappled with this very question when it scrapped its middle school bus program in September.
For years, the district bused students living west of Sepulveda Boulevard to Manhattan Beach Middle School, fearing it was too dangerous to let children cross the busy road.
But the district’s $440 yearly student bus fee didn’t come close to covering the costs, and soon, the program was siphoning $200,000 a year from the already lean general fund, deputy Superintendent Scott Smith said.
That didn’t include the hours spent dealing with lost bus passes, kids who didn’t get to the bus stop on time and the discipline problems that inevitably erupted with dozens of rambunctious middle-schoolers crammed into small quarters.
Then there were the angry calls from neighbors, who complained about black exhaust fumes and rumbling engines so early in the morning.
“We had 10 or 12 reasons why we were cutting it,” Smith said.
“We had a choice of money going into busing or money going into the classroom,” he said. “It’s a pretty clear choice.”
Parents didn’t take the decision lightly.
“Some of our parents are dual working parents, and the times they have to leave the home are before or after their children do,” said Lauren Burton, president of the Manhattan Beach Middle School PTA, which opposed the decision. “They had come to rely upon this service.”
Parents offered to pick up the tab for bus service, but the district declined, because the arrangement still wouldn’t have solved problems with liability, misbehaving students or neighborhood complaints.
So the PTA enticed MTA to provide a public bus route just for Manhattan Beach middle-schoolers. Parents pay $20 a month, the children get where they need to go and the district doesn’t have to worry about a thing.
“It’s had its ups and downs, but overall, people are pretty happy at this point,” Burton said.
But is it the same as the little yellow bus?
Not exactly, students say.
The MTA bus is marked with graffiti, and the neat orderly rows of the school bus are replaced by rigid seats facing each other. And, of course, “it’s not yellow,” says seventh-grader David Whinfrey.
Then there are the MTA bus drivers, who change from day to day.
“I think it’s easier to get on the school bus, because the bus driver always recognizes you,” says seventh-grader Evan Olson, who rode the yellow bus last year.
“The bus driver knew us by name,” recalls seventh-grader Stewart Crichton.
School buses didn’t always cause this kind of trouble for schools.
In the 1940s and 50s, the yellow buses were all the rage, winding down rural roads and through budding suburban subdivisions. At the time, one-room schoolhouses still dotted California’s rural landscape, much to the dismay of the Department of Education, which wanted larger school districts to benefit from economies of scale.
To get school districts to consolidate, the state offered financial incentives — extra funding for poor areas, money to replace aging buses — so school systems would transport students into more centralized campuses.
Everything worked fine. Until 1978.
That’s when Proposition 13 passed, radically limiting education funds and forcing the state to put a cap on its transportation spending. The state no longer paid to replace old buses. Nor did it keep up with rising transportation costs, like salaries or gas prices.
Today, “either districts come up with the money out of their general fund or they reduce their service,” Austin says.
That’s why only a few districts still offer the yellow buses. Torrance offers it for every child, but other school systems — Hawthorne, Lawndale and the Los Angeles Unified School District — transport regular education students only from overcrowded schools.
Still, even in Torrance, students aren’t lining up for bus rides.
Roughly 900 children — less than 4 percent of the district’s enrollment — ride the bus each day, not counting the 600 or so special education students.
Some schools have just a handful of bus riders, maybe five or six on a 70-passenger bus, said Mike Culver, transportation manager. Seaside Elementary School has just one child who takes the bus.
The district fills the empty seats by lumping together special education and regular students and using one bus to make a couple of stops, so it’s rare to see only a few heads peeking out the windows.
But the cost is still a headache. The buses drain about $1.2 million from the district’s $160 million general fund each year. The yearly $220 student bus fee doesn’t cut it — Torrance officials say it costs $50,000 to $60,000 a year to operate a school bus, and the Office of School Transportation puts the average costs of transporting a child to school at $987.
“It’s just a subsidy,” Culver says of the bus pass.
If the district wanted to make the bus system more efficient, it could reduce the number of bus stops, but that might scare away the few student riders it has, Culver says. Ridership dropped about 10 percent when the district started charging bus fees in the early 1990s.
And if the 21-square-mile district ditched the bus system entirely, many students would face long walks and busy roads.
“In this city, there are a lot of places where (buses are) important for safety reasons,” said Kevin Condon, Torrance chief business officer. “The city doesn’t have a lot of crossing guards.”
“If you have a small city with a school in every neighborhood, nobody has to walk more than a mile to school,” he added.
Still, in car-loving, cash-strapped California, school buses aren’t likely to make a comeback.
When the afternoon bell rings, school parking lots are choked with impatient parents honking horns and curbs lined with cars.
“People in California like to do things themselves,” Culver jokes.
John
User ID: 9510053 Feb 9th 11:05 AM
I think it would be very pleasing to see fewer and fewer school buses and more and more MTA buses on the streets!
Roberto
User ID: 9161143 Apr 25th 3:14 AM
From Daily News
April 24, 2003
******
'Green' bidders win school bus routes
By Helen Gao
Staff Writer
Despite intense lobbying from the Teamsters union and San Fernando Valley business leaders, the Los Angeles school board rejected the bid Thursday of its main bus-service provider, instead agreeing to spend $1 million extra a year to put kids in "green" diesel buses.
The decision likely will lead to layoffs of 300 bus drivers, mechanics and other support staffers, including many at Laidlaw Transit Inc.'s facilities in Canoga Park and Tujunga, where it operates a fleet of 350 older diesel buses.
Laidlaw, the lowest bidder at $37.5 million to serve 258 routes for three years with conventional diesel buses, was backed by the Valley Industry and Commerce Association and Teamsters Local 572. The company had also hired Fleishman Hillard, a politically connected communications firm, to lobby on its behalf.
Despite facing a budget crunch, the board unanimously chose First Student Inc. and Cardinal Transportation Group Inc. for a $67.5 million, five-year contract.
First Student plans to invest $18.5 million to buy "green" diesel buses, with traps for minute particles of pollution, that would emit significantly lower quantities of these particulates than Laidlaw's conventional diesel fleet does.
"It's better for the kids to have a new bus to ride on, with the latest emission controls in it," said Antonio Rodriguez, director of transportation for the Los Angeles Unified School District.
"I am looking at a brand new bus for $10 more a day roughly. Yeah, it's more money, but the environmental impact on the kids is worth it. It's not all about bucks."
According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, children who ride a conventional diesel school bus for an hour or two every day are being exposed to as much as 46 times the cancer risk deemed acceptable by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. A representative from the environmental group told the board the pollution level inside a school bus is four times higher than outside.
"In a financial-crisis situation, we are shocked the district would award (the contract to higher bidders) under this kind of scenario," said James Ferraro, area vice president for Laidlaw, which has provided transportation service to the district for 18 years.
He added that the company has plans to acquire buses running on "clean" compressed natural gas as it retires old vehicles.
But school district officials said their decision to contract with the higher bidders makes business sense. Laidlaw now operates 640 routes for the LAUSD, or 57 percent of the routes that are under contract. The district also has its own fleet.
When Laidlaw bus drivers went on strike last April to demand higher wages, more than 75,000 students were stranded, and district officials scrambled to provide interim transportation. Even with losing the contract for 258 routes, Laidlaw remains the primary transportation provider for the district, serving 528 routes.
"The distribution of contracts is advantageous to the district so it's not over-reliant on one contractor," said LAUSD business manager Michael Eugene.
Rodriguez said Laidlaw is not adequately staffed to handle its contracted workload. On any given day, he said, district officials must send nine to 10 buses to cover for Laidlaw, which has not been able to meet the contract requirement to have extra buses and staffers on hand to handle contingencies.
School board member Marlene Canter said kids in her district have missed first and second periods because Laidlaw buses didn't show up.
"They promised more than they can deliver," said Canter.
In Laidlaw's defense, Ferraro said the district has hired away some 300 bus drivers from the company in the past three years, resulting in a constant struggle for Laidlaw to recruit and train new ones.
When news spread that the district procurement staff recommended against its bid, Laidlaw mounted an aggressive campaign employing Fleishman Hillard, which helped the district pass its $3.35 billion school construction bond last November. Board members said they received several e-mails and letters.
District spokeswoman Stephanie Brady said Fleishman Hillard is not currently a district consultant.
Fred Gaines, VICA board chairman, wrote a letter in support of Laidlaw.
"Laidlaw Education has provided the LAUSD with reliable, safe and cost-effective service for many years," he wrote.
"Combined with Laidlaw Education's strong commitment to the civic community in Los Angeles, the company employs 725 hard-working men and women whose livelihoods would be greatly impacted by the staff decision."
Lonnie Holmes, business representative for Teamsters Local 572, said his members would be hit hard.
"We've got a lot of single-parent bus drivers who make their living off Laidlaw," he said. "Laidlaw has provided good wages and benefits to those single parents."
Bart Reed
User ID: 1606604 Apr 25th 9:02 AM
The above Daily News story was from Friday, 04/25
Los Angeles Times: Friday, April 25, 2003
School Bus Pact Awarded to Rival
By Solomon Moore
Times Staff Writer
One year after a monthlong bus drivers' strike against Laidlaw Education Services that stranded thousands of schoolchildren, the Los Angeles Board of Education voted Thursday to give a third of that company's routes to a competitor.
The board voted 5 to 1, with Jose Huizar voting against and Julie Korenstein abstaining, to give 250 routes to the Cincinnati-based First Student bus company, for at least five years at a cost of $12 million.
Officials at the Los Angeles Unified School Dis-trict said the strike prompted them to further diversify the district's bus contractors. They were also displeased by Laidlaw's service, accord-ing to a confidential memo obtained by The Times.
"Laidlaw's performance has been poor," the memo stated. Laidlaw failed to cover some of its 786 routes and in-house district drivers have had to pick up the slack. A reduction in Laidlaw's routes, the memo said, "will help Laidlaw improve its performance and become a successful vendor for the district."
But Laidlaw Vice President Jim Ferraro complained that his company had some problems because the district kept hiring away drivers. "They've taken 300 of our drivers away over the last four years," he said.
The Teamsters union, which had struck Laidlaw, has complained that First Student employs non-union drivers. But district officials said that is not why the new contract was awarded and that Thursday's vote should not be seen as anti-union.
Most board members and district staffers argued that, beyond questions about its performance, Laidlaw offered a less attractive contract proposal.
Bidders were asked to submit plans for three- and five-year contracts for buses with reduced emissions. Laidlaw offered a three-year proposal for older, regular diesel buses. First Student's proposal also was for diesel buses, but with sulfur caps that reduce air pollution.
A 2001 study of California school buses found that children riding inside a diesel bus are exposed to four times the level of toxic fumes as someone riding in a car behind that bus.
Þ=+Þ+=Þ
Dane
User ID: 1878484 Apr 25th 2:49 PM
Everything worked fine. Until 1978.
That’s when Proposition 13 passed, radically limiting education funds and forcing the state to put a cap on its transportation spending. The state no longer paid to replace old buses. Nor did it keep up with rising transportation costs, like salaries or gas prices
That’s when Proposition 13 passed, radically limiting education funds and forcing the state to put a cap on its transportation spending. The state no longer paid to replace old buses. Nor did it keep up with rising transportation costs, like salaries or gas prices
It's interesting how, 25 years ago, everyone against Prop. 13 was alarmist, or just plain misinformed. My parents were not fond of property tax levels back then, but even they could see the writing on the wall of the effects of Prop. 13 on education, and we were directly effected the next summer when my Summer School session was cancelled due to lack of funds. Needless to say, it's been a frustrating juggling act for school districts since then.