End free busing!

One of the most important challenges faced by the administration and new board is to make the Neighborhood Schools Initiative work. Kids have to get off buses and move into neighborhood schools. This has a number of advantages, especially in encouraging schools once again to play a role in creating strong neighborhoods. But without stronger measures, it seems unlikely there will be a significant reduction in busing or a significant increase in attendence at the neighborhood school.

One approach is simply to end busing. Denver, for example, ended busing when the state subsidies stopped and reassigned all students to schools in their neighborhoods. Probably the strongest argument against such a drastic measure is fear that it would kill the citywide specialty schools--the Montessori, arts, gifted and talented, language immersion, and others that attract students from all over the city because of the strength of their programs. From a business sense it hardly seems intelligent to kill the most successful products. Thus MPS has arrived at a standoff: it needs to drastically reduce busing but not at the expense of killing the specialty schools.

There is a solution that could achieve both aims: keep busing but charge parents for it. Thus, parents who found busing beneficial because it allowed their child to attend a specialty school could continue to do so if that was high on their priority list. Those parents who chose busing as a form of free day care might take another look at real day care.

If parents paid the cost of busing there would no longer be reasons for the rules aimed at reducing the number of children eligible for busing but also forming an incentive to send kids to distant schools so they would qualify for free busing. For example, when my daughter was five, I found she did not qualify for a bus ride because her day care was too near the school. If we had moved her to a center across the city she would have qualified for a free trip. Because of the MPS rules, I was unable to get her on the bus even if I paid for it.

An immediate criticism of this proposal is that it is unfair because low income parents will find it harder to pay for busing than middle class parents. One solution might be to set up a fund to subsidize busing on a sliding scale based on income. But if MPS has the money for such a fund, is busing the best use for it? One can think of many uses that might better benefit low-income students: subsidized tutoring after school, a longer school day, or books for the student's home, for example.