American public school districts will have to resort to rummaging around the sad teacher’s lounge couch cushions for extra change to make up for the costs of running buses thanks to rising gas prices. If the seemingly endless war in Iran wasn’t already a pain point for everyone’s wallets, the underfunded public school systems are getting hit fairly harder. For some school districts, as the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports, it has come at a cost of a few extra thousand dollars a month. For bigger districts, some are spending an extra $200,000 or more, a month.
Milwaukee Public Schools started the fuel crisis with an extra expenditure of $148,000 for the month of March alone. For both April and May, that number rose to $250,000 per month. The Milwaukee district does serve a relatively larger area and community than say a rural district. But taking in that Milwaukee’s district doesn’t exclusively use diesel transport, but encourages local public transit and utilizes alternative vehicles that do not run on diesel, the cost is still exorbitant.
Hoping to make a dent in some of the extra fuel costs, the Milwaukee district is reevaluating some of its bus usage, as well as welcoming new electric vehicles to its transportation fleet this summer. But not every district has those kinds of options.
Diesel prices are sending districts into damage control
Some districts have been able to weather the storm as annual budgets usually build in higher estimated fuel prices to account for market fluctuations, but not for the fluctuations seen in the last three months.
In Florida, WESH reports that Marion County Public Schools estimates fuel costing the district an extra $750,000 to $1 million this year. In neighboring Orange County, the district is “actively monitoring and minimizing excessive vehicle idling to decrease fuel consumption.”
Executives of Washington’s Yakima School District told Reuters the price of diesel went up 64 percent, costing the district more than $213,000 a year to operate its 60 buses. Further east, the Thief River Falls Public School District in Minnesota has been able to manage the 30% increase but the superintendent Christopher Mills said, “if the prices continue to increase we could be in a position of reducing support services to students.”
In a survey shared with Reuters by the School Superintendents Association, a third of US schools are already taking money away from other programs to cover the additional costs of fueling, while a fifth of schools are at least tapping into the little reserves they have. For those that have had the benefit of diversifying its transportation fleets the cost has been easier to swallow. But for the already underfunded districts, the thousands of dollars extra gas is costing is going to come at a bigger price, education and quite literally our future.
