Busing change forces charter school to cut budget
Board ended plan with charter
The Buffalo area’s largest charter school is spending an additional $1 million in the upcoming school year on student busing — and making a wide range of related budget cuts — as a result of a more restrictive busing policy enacted by the Buffalo Board of Education.
The Charter School for Applied Technologies can swallow the added costs next school year but will face classroom cuts that would “dramatically alter the nature of the school” if the board’s policy is retained in future years, said J. Efrain Martinez, school superintendent.
“It is unfair, it is unwise, and it is unsafe,” Martinez said of the policy.
Instead of spending $200,000 to bus about 1,000 Buffalo elementary and middle school students under a previous agreement with the Buffalo schools, Applied Technologies is finalizing an individual agreement with First Student bus company at a cost of about $1.2 million, Martinez said.
The school, which is located on the Town of Tonawanda side of Kenmore Avenue, has a total budget of about $20 million.
As a result of the added busing costs, Martinez said, Applied Technologies has agreed to these cuts:
• Putting on hold plans to build a greenhouse and culinary arts classroom, as well as the purchase of 30 classroom computers.
• Twenty percent reductions in building maintenance and the purchase of books and supplies.
• The elimination of bonus payments to high-performing teachers.
• Ending bus service for students
in kindergarten through eighth-grade living less than three-quarters of a mile from school.
As a result of a state Education Department ruling, Buffalo school officials said they either had to end previous busing arrangements with Applied Technologies and Kadimah School in Amherst or — upon request — provide the same service to as many as 41 other nonpublic suburban schools within a 15- mile radius of Buffalo.
The board voted to end those previous arrangements for financial, legal and logistical reasons.
Subsequent negotiations between officials of Buffalo and Applied Technologies failed to produce an agreement, but Martinez said he will continue to consider legal, legislative and political options to reinstate or approximate the previous arrangement.
Charter schools are not reimbursed by the state for transportation costs, so busing is far more expensive for them than it is for traditional public school districts.
In a related development, six Buffalo charter schools are making joint arrangements to provide busing for students during classes in August, when they are in session but traditional city schools are not, said Corrinne Cristofaro, executive director of the Western New York Charter School Coalition.
The Board of Education’s new policy continues busing for Buffalo elementary school students who attend charter schools in the city, but only on days when the city’s public schools are in session. That decision also resulted from a state ruling.
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