Let's talk about regional transportation

I posted much of this as a thread over on Twitter at the end of last week, but for those who might be more comfortable reading more than 280 characters at a time, here it is in prose.

Regional transportation stems from our state history of having lots and lots of districts, some of them teeny. The state has encouraged those teeny districts to regionalize, both to save on overhead and to provide more opportunities for students. The overhead is about things like superintendents and business offices, of course, but also even buildings; the opportunties are due to the difficulty of fielding both a football and a soccer team or putting together an orchestra or an AP physics class if you don't have many kids.
A whole section of Chapter 71 of the Mass General Laws is devoted to regionalization. On transportation, recognizing that bussing would be necessary for regionalization to work, MGL Ch. 71 section 16C sets a mile and a half limit for bussing, and then says:

[the] district shall be obliged to provide transportation for all school children in grades kindergarten through twelve and the commonwealth shall reimburse such district to the full extent of the amounts expended for such transportation, subject to appropriation

The closing phrase is the kicker, of course, as it means, essentially, "if the Legislature gets to funding it," which often means they don't.

Now, if you aren't familiar with regionals--and there are whole swaths of the state that largely aren't!--I think it's not clear what we're talking about here. I've seen some pushback on regionals organizing around this reimbursement, with some questioning why they get it at all. I think that some of this is due to a lack of knowledge about the disparities of size we're discussing here. So let's look at some numbers (all dollar amounts here are FY17 from the most recent spending report released by DESE).

Wachusett Regional, just to Worcester's north, has the largest enrollment of any regional district in the state. In FY17, it had an enrollment of 7100 students. That puts it similar in student population to Chelsea, which had 7038 students.
Similar number of kids, then.
Here's the area the kids in those two districts are coming in from:

Chelsea kids are coming from 2.5 square miles; Wachusett Regional's are coming in from 155 square miles.

It's not suprising then, that while Chelsea spent $2.5M on in-district transportation, Wachusett Regional spent $4.7M in FY17.

Here's another: Quabbin Regional, just to Wachusett's north, had 2200 students in FY17. That's about the same as Norwell, out along the coast south of Quincy, which had 2151 students in FY17.

Here's the area those two sets of students are coming from: 

Norwell kids are coming in from 21 square miles, while Quabbin Regional kids are coming in from 162.7 square miles.

In fact, a single one of Quabbin's five towns, New Braintree, is nearly identical in size to Norwell.

In FY17, while Norwell spent $872,000 on in-district transportation, Quabbin spent $1.5M to move about the same number of kids.

We could do this with nearly any regional and equivalent single town district (I'm not cherry picking these, 'though I am dropping the Cambridge and Weston types), but here's one more: 

Mohawk Trail, out along Route 2 west, had 966 kids enrolled in FY17. That's about the same size as Wrentham (which most of us know for the outlets), out on 495 south, which had 938 students enrolled in the same year.
But here's where those kids are coming from: 

Wrentham kids come in from 22.9 square miles, while Mohawk Trail kids come in from 253 square miles.

A difference of ten times.

Wrentham spent $699,000 on in-district transportation in FY17.

Mohawk Trail spent $1.09M. It was the fourth largest expense, after teachers, paraprofessionals, and health insurance.

Now, all districts are additionally having an issue with getting competitive bids for transportation; you might remember that there was an article in the T&G about this a few months back. So they're not only stuck on distance; in some cases, they're also stuck on price.

But those kids still are guaranteed an education, even if it's inconvenient, even if it's expensive. And it's still the state's responsibility to provide it, at least in part. When they don't, they drive a major hole in the budgets of these districts, holes that aren't supposed to be there.
And that's why the regionals are organizing for transportation reimbursement to be fully funded.