rector of the office of statewide efficiencies at the Rhode Island Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. “Under this method each school district was responsible for the full cost of these buses.” In short, school bus routes were needlessly crisscrossing each other.
Deadhead routes were out of control and with them went costs and effi- ciencies. Student ride times, especially those for students with disabilities, were far too lengthy. In 2007, the department of education, or simply RIDE, issued an RFP as it sought a transportation consultant to step in and provide a feasibility study for implementing solutions. At about the same time, the state assembly passed legislation to create a statewide transportation system for out-of-district special education and non-public school students, whose routes were at the heart of the problem. Furthering the need to quell runaway school bus costs was the fact that state transportation funding for local districts dried up. “Te districts look to the state not only for direct education aid, but also
for statewide solutions to issues not easily handled on a district-by-district basis,” said Brown. “A top priority was a single statewide, efficient and well-run transportation system for special education, non-public, career and technical, charter school and other students who go out of their resident community to other schools for their educational program.” Management Partnership Services, Inc. (MPS) won the contract in De- cember 2007 and shortly thereafter put together a logistics plan, said Andy Forsyth, formerly the company’s co-founder and vice president. MPS helped RIDE identify a subset of all out-of-district special education routes and restricted them to only 12 districts, following Brown’s request to keep the project within a limited scope, at first. Following the study’s conclusion, RIDE put out a bid for a third-party system manager. Transpar Group came on board after winning the contract. By 2012, Transpar acquired MPS. In the meantime, Transpar created a baseline aggregate cost of school districts providing their own transportation, limited it to just 12 schools to meet RIDE’s requirement to start small and compared it with a school bus contractor-provided model. Te result was a potential 8- to 12-percent cost benefit from outsourcing. And the students also stood to benefit from reduced deadhead miles and ride times. “A greater matrix of logistical options cut, in some instances, ride times in
half,” added Forsyth, who is now vice president of Transpar. “It was a win- win situation.”
TEAMWORK EQUATES TO BIG SAVINGS Still, the project was going to be extremely challenging despite Rhode Is-
land’s limited geographic size and a relatively small number of students. Te state’s inlets and natural barriers prohibit bus ride distances as the crow flies. Tere are no straight lines from here to there but plenty of twists and turns, according to Forsyth. “You can’t drive across Narragansett Bay, obviously,” he added. Transpar started with special education students, who by very nature can be placed into different schools depending upon their specific needs, Forsyth explained. Terefore, routes that serve this student population must be “very malleable because they’re ever changing,” he added. Next, private schools were phased in. Today, Transpar oversees the transportation of more than 2,600 stu- dents—about 1,300 of which are non-public or private school students, another 750 being students with disabilities and most of the others attending career and technical schools—and the school bus operations of contractors
50 School Transportation News • APRIL 2017
Teamwork between the Rhode Island Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, Transpar Group, First Student and Ocean State Transit are paramount to the program’s success.
At-a-Glance: Rhode Island’s Out-of-District Student Transportation Program Number of participating school districts:
44
(Two additional entities served in Massachusetts) Number of total school sites served: Number of student riders: 2,624 Number of school buses: 246
187 (155 for special education routes)
CELEBRATING25YEARS
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