Dear Editor,
For most Vermonters, the price of gas is something they notice at the pump.
But for our school leaders, fuel prices are something that’s everywhere, especially diesel. It is in the yellow buses rolling before sunrise, taking students to school and career and technical education programs and then carrying athletes to games and children home. When diesel prices rise, the money has to come from somewhere.
Yes, rising fuel prices are now an education issue. Our school budgets run on diesel. A school bus is not just a vehicle; it’s part of the public education infrastructure, and not every district has benefited from electric school buses.
A district can postpone replacing computers, and goodness knows we have plenty of deferred maintenance. But we cannot tell a child who lives 12 miles from school that the bus has become too expensive.
As we radically rethink consolidation and regionalization, fuel prices remind us how little control schools sometimes have over their costs. A dollar-per-gallon increase in diesel lands in the budget as a transportation overage. Then the superintendent and business manager have to find the money. Maintenance? Technology? Professional development? Or maybe pull from the rainy day fund, if they’re lucky enough to have one.
Eventually, though, the dollars come from what’s available to educate children. With school mergers likely, we will draw even more from that finite pool of education dollars.
School leaders should be asking: What does that dollar increase in diesel cost our district? Which of our students are most vulnerable? And perhaps most importantly: Are we treating transportation as an essential educational service or as someone else’s problem?
And the question for all of Vermont is deceptively simple: What are we willing to stop funding to keep our school buses moving?
Steven Berbeco
Winooski, Vt.
