March 9

Dawn's corrected post:

http://sasklearning.gov.sk.ca/branches/ed_finance/funding/pdfs/Section_C_Transportation.pdf

The link shown above is for the 2006-07 Funding Policy Manual – K-12 Operating Grant

In this document you will see how much the school divisions receive in grant money for bussing rural children to school. However, it did not specify the time frame that these funds cover.

I called Sask. Learning this morning and spoke with a lady in the grants department to discuss the bus rate information we found in the funding manual for 2006-07. She informed me that the $185 is indeed the figure and it covers the whole school year. So that makes it $185 per Km/per student/per school year (up to a maximum of 190 days) plus the additional $185 per pupil/per year.

I asked her how many rural students were on the school buses this year and she told me that of the 167,000 students for the entire province there were 36,120 rural students riding the school bus.

Holy cow! Do the math

That's $6,682,200 in flat fees alone. Add the kms to it.

Just for kicks let's say that all the kids have to travel only 5 Km to school and 5 Km back home.

Hardly likely.............That brings a total of $66,822,000 in Km fees for the year.

$73,504,200, total for the year

With some students having to be on the bus at 7:25 a.m., we can assume that this estimate is waaaay on the low side.

The other question I have is where does the rest of the money come from since ,according to the funding manual the "Total provincial funding recognition for rural transportation in 2006-07 is appoximately $59.65M" ?

The other person I spoke with regarding this issue at SK Learning said that the school divisions get the amount show above and the rest comes from the education taxes we pay.

On John Gormley’s program this morning Rod Luhning was asked if the PVSD was aware of any additional funding expected in the future by the government. His answer was “No”

If these are the current costs and the costs are obviously going to be greater for bussing children to school, it is to be assumed that rural Saskatchewan is getting slammed by the government and School Divisions in more than one respect.
Rural communities are going to have their growth stunted because there won’t be any schools.

The children are going to be robbed of just being kids because play time and extra curricular activities just won’t be possible for most due to long bus rides.

Children’s health issues are going to be more prevalent due to less sleep and taking in the fumes and dpm (diesel particle matter) that is often higher inside the bus than outside the bus.

Children’s levels of progress in school are going to drop.

And here’s a good one…

The parents of these poor kids get to pay more in taxes so all the above can take place.

Dawn Reich
Kronau