Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost filed a lawsuit against the Columbus City Schools after warning earlier in the week it must resume busing private and charter school students or it will be breaking the law.
It’s the combination of more families using taxpayer-paid vouchers to send their kids to other schools along with a bus driver shortage that’s been going on for four years.
Yost said the district has "blatantly failed to comply" with state law requiring public school districts to transport both their students and those in the district limits who are attending private or charter schools. The lawsuit said the district has declared around 1,380 students impractical to transport based on six factors the district approved to determine eligibility.
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"Students deemed impractical to transport and their student families have been denied the freedom of choice of educational institution," Yost wrote in the lawsuit. "Moreover, many families have been forced to endure financial hardships to acquire the transportation for their children that the Columbus School Board has refused to provide."
District said state law allows its actions
The district said in a statement that it "believes its actions are consistent with the laws promulgated by the General Assembly and is complying with its legal obligations to transport students."
The statement added that Yost's lawsuit infringes on the district's right to make ineligibility determinations, it attempts to circumvent the authority of legislators who passed the ineligibility law and that it's "also an infringement upon the equal rights of public school districts and community or nonpublic school parents/guardians to due process."
The district is transporting 37,000 students to 113 Columbus City Schools buildings and 9,000 kids to 167 private and charter school buildings.
Columbus City Schools executive director of transportation Rodney Stufflebean said the district condensed and combined routes, brought in contractors and tried to hire more drivers. But he said the district also had to consider the state law on ineligibility.
“We look at the resources that we have through the legislature and things of that nature and the tools and the rules and the guidelines in the Ohio Revised Code that gives us ways to combat the shortage of drivers," Stufflebean said. “We had to start using those as part of our tools to efficiently route for the students that we are 100% obligated to provide transportation for."
The district has a little over half the bus drivers it did four years ago. The district is paying some parents to transport their kids or put them on public transit. But Yost said in the lawsuit that money won't go out till the end of the school year, and some families "have been forced to resign their jobs or take other actions that jeopardize their jobs in order to provide their children the transportation that the Columbus School Board has refused to provide."
Impact of vouchers on the case
Yost suggested in the suit that the district is trying to force students to leave those non-public schools. He cited comments from Columbus Board of Education member Brandon Simmons, who suggested struggling families choose to send their kids to Columbus City Schools instead.
"Multiple private and charter schools are faced with huge declines in enrollment and attendance because of students’ inability to find transportation. These declines in enrollment and attendance equate to declines in funding and threaten the continued viability of these institutions," Yost wrote. "The Columbus School Board’s actions, therefore, threaten the competitive vigor of Ohio’s markets for educational services for K-12 students."
The school bus driver shortage has been going on for years, and those in public education said the increase in the use of vouchers has only added to the problem.
"A lot of the laws and legislation are from days passed when the environment of school transportation looked far different," Stufflebean said. "What we need to do as a system is sit back, look at this together as a whole, take input on what we're seeing and how we're dealing with this. And let's create some some legislation and laws that put us in the right direction to be successful as a group, and not penalizes for things that we have no control over."
A survey of districts done for the Ohio School Boards Association revealed around 7% report being fully staffed with an adequate number of substitute drivers. Nearly a third of districts need subs and extra trips to transport all students. In about 13% of districts, office staff and mechanics are driving regular routes. And about 9% of districts say no solution is working.
The lawsuit was filed in the Ohio Supreme Court.
