An audio clip from a public Jackson Board of Education Meet and Greet sent to us by a reader details one prospective school board member’s plan for private school busing: consolidating students headed to 56 different schools on to a single bus!
Listen here:
Question: One of the most important problems you are going to face is busing to private schools. As you know, every year the number of students has increased. How will you handle that since it comes off the top of the school budget?
Elenor Hannum: Alright, so currently we have 84 out-of-district Gen. Ed. schools that Jackson students are attending. 56 are in one town and 28 are spread throughout. We do bus to four schools that are out-of-district schools. I believe that we could probably consolidate two of the schools for busing to make that most cost-effective.
As far as the 56 schools in one town, where students are attending, it’s 56 separate schools. I believe we would have to look at what’s most cost-effective. We’re looking at, I didn’t do the actual numbers, but I know that there’s 484 that are not being bussed and the last count was 367 students are receiving a transportation in-lieu-of, the transportation reimbursement.
I believe that whatever is most cost-effective, down the road we have to look at that, look at those numbers. They would all have to be put on one bus going, basically it’s going to one town, so there would not be separate buses for separate schools. So that’s, you know, we’d have to look at what’s most cost-effective.
We’d hate to be the one planning the route for this bus. How will this single bus pick up every student headed to that one unnameable town (hint: its name starts with L and rhymes with Cakewood) and make 56 distinct stops to deliver them all to school on time?
Thankfully, scientists have been planning for this scenario for a while now. May we present: jet-powered busing! This baby can go almost 400 MPH, easily making up for the time spent loading and unloading students at dozens of stops.
However, the exorbitant cost of jet fuel might just tip the scale in favor of traditional buses, in which case maybe at least a few more bus routes will be needed.
Jackson Leaks 