SUSD pilot busing program may be funded by parents
By Leigh Ann Maze
The Saratoga Union School District could be busing students to school as early as this year, according to Superintendent Mary Gardner.
The SUSD stopped all busing in the mid-'80s. Since then, traffic congestion has grown, especially around the schools. Today, more than 80 percent of the district's students are driven to school by a parent or in a carpool, according to a parent survey on carpooling and busing that Altrans completed in June.
Altrans is a private grant-funded company that began working with the SUSD in early 1997, to implement a trip-reduction program. It is a major goal of the SUSD board of trustees to address traffic around the schools.
"We have a commitment to the city to help reduce traffic," Gardner said. "We're looking at alternatives geared toward safety and reducing traffic for the city as a whole."
The survey, which was sent home with all SUSD students, asked 10 questions about how students get to and from school. It aimed to find out who carpools, who does not, who would use busing and who would be willing to help pay for busing.
Ninety percent of elementary school parents and approximately 50 percent of the Redwood Middle School parents returned the survey, according to Gardner.
According to the survey results, only 19 percent of students currently carpool. An additional 66 percent of SUSD students are dropped off by a parent. Most parents said they don't carpool because it is "inconvenient."
Altrans and the SUSD hope to use the results of the survey to make carpooling more convenient.
Using a computer-mapping program, called GIS, Altrans sorted the parent information and will provide each interested party with a free match list of neighbors with whom they could easily carpool.
The survey also indicated that there is interest in the community to starting a busing program again.
Busing originally stopped shortly after the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978, which reduced the amount of local money available to schools. The proposition, combined with the increasing cost of school-busing programs, forced the SUSD to eliminate its school buses, as it did to many other public school districts across the state.
However, 64 percent of survey respondents said their children would use the school bus if convenient bus stops were available. About half of the parents said they were willing to help pay for school busing.
The busing program that took some Redwood Middle and Saratoga School students to Strawberry Park School in San Jose while their schools were under construction last year, was very successful, according to Gardner.
"There was some convenience because the parents weren't on the road as much," Gardner said. "And also a social benefit for the kids who made friends and had some social time between getting out of school and arriving home."
The SUSD hired R & D Consulting, a company that specializes in busing programs, to look at the survey information and help the SUSD set up a busing plan. Initially, the district will test a pilot busing program, which will most likely be funded by parents until the SUSD can apply for state funding, Gardner said.
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Saratoga, California Since 1955
