“I’m not going to say they’re not struggling
because they are,” Baber said. “The funding for today’s cost doesn’t cut it. The funding for- mula and the amount of funding hasn’t really changed for many years, so with costs going up, nothing else has changed.” He added that school districts are making
up the difference with local tax money, which can also be problematic because the tax base in the state’s many counties is often inadequate. “There is no giant industry anymore, so the tax base is not there. They’re strapped and they’re making it up anyway they can, which again has led most of them to look at their bus routes and downsize as they can,” he continued. “They do that through attrition, when somebody retires, they look at the bus routes to see if they can change anything or consolidate.” Baber said in the past, the state offered a
program that rewarded the use of biodiesel fuel blends by returning 100 percent of the money spent by the district. “That went away several years ago,” he noted.
The Endgame While Ammon encourages school districts to
seek alternative funding sources, he also cau- tions them to know the limits of funding. “I think a higher level of understanding of funding is really going to become critical for transportation folks because I’m of the opinion that all of the largesse that’s come down over the last few years is going to go away and we’ll be back in an era of doing more with less, and so we’re going to have to be better at under- standing where all that money comes from,” he warned. “Understanding not only where the money comes from but how you can use it, I think is really important. School districts cannot depend solely on state funding for transpor- tation. They can’t anymore and it’s going to become increasingly obvious that they can’t because, I’m of the opinion that within the next couple of fiscal cycles we’re [going to] see some notable constraints on school funding in gener- al and transportation funding specifically. “I think we’re going to see budget cuts across
states because of all of the ways the federal money was used,” Ammon continued. “And I think in many instances one-time money was used for ongoing expenses and at some point, we’re going to have to figure how we’re going to pay for all those things and there isn’t going to be enough money to do it so we’re going to have to make cuts.” ●
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