SPECIAL REPORT
School Districts Use Data, Routing For Medicaid Reimbursements
Written by Mark Rowh T
here’s no getting around the fact that transport- ing students is an expensive enterprise. Add to that the extra measures needed for serving students with disabilities, and costs grow sub-
stantially higher than for other routine operations. For school some districts, at least a portion of that extra expense is being offset with funds from the federal gov- ernment. Through provisions in the legislation authorizing Medicaid funding, school systems may file for reimburse- ment for transportation to and from specified eligible services that students with disabilities need during the school day. These services can include physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech pathology or therapy ser- vices, psychological counseling, and nursing services. Of course, that’s based on acceptable submission of
the required reports, which in turn rests on providing accurate ridership figures. Currently, reporting practices vary among school districts across the country, from relying on paper-based approaches to capitalizing on advanced features offered by routing software and relat- ed student ridership verification. Teena Mitchell, special needs transportation coordi-
nator for Greenville County Schools in Greenville, South Carolina, noted that considering the extra costs involved in serving special needs riders, seeking reimbursement is well worth the effort. “I think it’s safe to say the cost of transporting students
with disabilities is substantially higher than transporting those without them and plays a major role in the over- all cost of educating our students with disabilities,” said Mitchell, who is also president of the National Associa- tion for Pupil Transportation. Even if reimbursements go back into a school district’s general fund rather than the transportation department’s budget, she added, the dollars benefit the entire district and can be tracked back to the benefit of the transporta- tion department in supporting areas such as personnel, training and equipment needs. Of the 78,000 students Greenville County serves daily,
nearly 16 percent are students with disabilities. The vat vast majority of those students, 88 percent according to Mitchell, receive the same transportation as non-disabled students and ride general education buses. The remain- ing 12 percent receive specialized transportation and are served on 111 specialized school buses. Payment is based on a standard amount per trip. For the 2023-2024 school year, the amount was $13.35 per
20 School Transportation News • JANUARY 2025
trip—although the rate as of Oct. 1 has increased to $29.06. At the standard of $13.35 per trip, a typical school district of Greenville’s size could have expected to receive about $221,000 this school year, Mitchell calculated. To file for reimbursement, school bus drivers are given
a form that lists qualified students listed for the route in question and the dates transported. When two weeks of information has been recorded, a clerk who manages the program enters the information into the Medicaid system for payment. The school district has routing software but as of this
report wasn’t using for tracking Medicaid reimburse- ments. However, transportation staff were evaluating options for moving in that direction. This step has already been taken at Colorado’s Weld
County School District 6, said Chad Hawley, director of transportation. Routing software is now being used to track ridership in the district’s 60 routes, including 26 designated for serving students who require specialized transportation. Software features include custom reporting func-
tionality to capture and document data such as days qualifying students rode, where and what time they were picked up and dropped off, and which personnel were involved. A student information specialist incorporates the relevant details in a report that is shared with the Medicaid specialist in the district’s finance department. Along with improved accuracy, the workload involved
in reporting has been reduced. “We used to have someone collect daily student counts
from all of our specialized routes, input the data into a spreadsheet, and then send all the spreadsheets to the finance department,” Hawley noted. “The previous way was time consuming and not always accurate.” Plans for a similar approach are in the works at El Do-
rado Union High School District in Placerville, California, where drivers log attendance and submit monthly reports for transportation provided to an average of 130 students who meet Medicaid requirements. “When drivers turn in reports, they go first to our
dispatchers, who enter the data into a shared spread- sheet,” said Sarah Lemke, director of transportation. “This spreadsheet is then accessible to both the finance team and the student success team, which also tracks our McKinney-Vento [Homeless Assistance Act] students.” This collective info feeds into a report for both state and federal reimbursements.
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