IowaWatch and Iowa Public Radio teamed up for a report on transportation costs in Iowa’s school districts and the disparity in funding that dates back decades but only got serious attention in the past couple of years.
The IPR story includes a map of school district population density and transportation costs using 2015 numbers. North Tama spends around $194,000 on transportation, Gladbrook-Reinbeck $280,000, GMG $116,000, Union $544,000, and South Tama $643,000.
Of the 10 districts in the IPR chart with the greatest costs, six of them are in whole-grade-sharing agreements, which means they are busing students to other towns. Of the 10 districts with the lowest costs, six are urban/suburban and one more has a large population center.
IPR focused on Greene County, which has multiple attendance centers, but that’s going to change, in part because of the transportation costs. I’ll do more on that in another blog post. The trend of putting all students in one centralized location (or at least in one town) in a district, even while that means other towns lose their schools entirely, has accelerated over the past decade, pressured as always by declining enrollment and low state funding. The hitch in this scenario, though, is when a consolidated district has two population centers, neither of which are centered. That means someone will lose out big. (Case in point, Gladbrook-Reinbeck.)
IowaWatch looked at Davis County, which as recently as 2011 was both the largest one-high-school district and largest one-high-school area in the state (there’s a difference). Davis County is among the districts not allowed to spend more on transportation and is losing out on nearly $206,000 a year because of it.
A bill to equalize this funding statewide over a decade passed the Senate but died in the House as the Legislature engaged in desperate belt-tightening.