Lawmakers voted Tuesday to ask Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge for an opinion on whether they can change how the state pays for student transportation, in light of court rulings on education funding.
The vote came during a joint meeting of the House and Senate education committees.
The point, said Rep. Nate Bell, I-Mena, who made the motion, is to see whether the state can fund school buses based on actual cost instead of a flat per-student rate.
“We want to ensure we have a fair funding mechanism, and there’s not equity right now,” he said in an interview. “We need guidance from the attorney general on what we can and can’t do to pursue that equity.”
Currently, the state gives schools $321.20 per student for transportation costs, but it costs far more to transport rural students, who are spread out over a large area, than urban students. Rep. Reginald Murdock, D-Marianna, said that’s a problem for the districts he represents in the Delta.
He sponsored House Bill 2095 during the 2013 regular session, which required the Bureau of Legislative Research to study transportation times. The study showed that some students in Arkansas spend as much as 5 hours and 34 minutes on the bus each school day.
If the Arkansas Legislature were to pass a 90-minute maximum, 106 school districts would require more funding for buses, drivers and fuel in the amount of about $2.7 million a year. If the ride time was limited to no more than 50 minutes, 130 districts would need an estimated $25.2 million to meet that goal, the study showed.
“We don’t seem to have – so far — the gall or the courage to do what we need to do with the data and that’s because it costs money,” Murdock said. “We’ve been doing this wrong.”
About one third of the state’s school districts’ transportation costs are covered by the state funding, said Richard Wilson of the Bureau of Legislative Research.
“The other two-thirds need somewhere between one dollar and big dollars to spend on transportation and they use a lot of other things … to fund that transportation,” he told lawmakers. “You look at West Memphis and they’re spending $110 a kid on transportation. You look at Mount Judea, they’re spending $1,100 on transportation — a tenfold difference.”
It’s easy for the bureau to estimate transportation costs based on route miles, Wilson added. However, lawmakers aren’t sure if they can change funding to reflect route miles instead of number of students.
In the wake of the multiple legal challenges involving education funding, the state’s Supreme Court found that Arkansas did not provide an equitable or adequate education to students across the state. The Education committees were charged with ensuring “equal educational opportunity for an adequate education,” under Arkansas Annotated Code 10-3-2102.
The $321.20 in per-student transportation funding is part of the $6,646 the state provides schools for each student a year. That funding model came about because of the court’s decision on a funding case brought by the now-defunct Lake View School District.
In May, Pulaski County Circuit Judge Chris Piazza issued a memorandum opinion stating that the Legislature did not violate the constitutional rights of the Deer/Mount Judea School District with its funding model. Among other complaints, school district attorney Clay Fendley said state transportation funding for Deer/Mount Judea is so low that the district has to divert education money to help pay for its busing and transportation costs.
Students can spend hours getting to school or back, he said. The towns of Deer and Mount Judea are 22 miles apart in an area just south of the Buffalo National River. The school district, which is in the Ozark Mountains, maintains campuses in both towns.
Lawyers for the school district argued that was a violation of the Arkansas Constitution’s requirements of a “general, suitable, and efficient system of free public schools.” In his opinion, Piazza wrote that “the constitution is silent as to transportation time to schools.”
“This court cannot assume law that is not there,” wrote Piazza. “Therefore, this court cannot state that transportation time violates the constitution.”