Taken for a Ride: State Did Little to Stop Runaway School Bus Costs
11/01/2011
Katherine Poythress/Civil Beat
Editor's note: This article is part of a series on Hawaii's runaway school bus costs. Read other articles in the series.
Hawaii Department of Education officials say they knew as soon as they opened school bus service bids in 2008 that something was wrong. The private companies that take kids to and from school every day were raising their rates — significantly. And none of them were bidding against each other anymore.
Yet even after four years of no competitive bids for school bus contracts and soaring prices, the department and Board of Education have done little to put the brakes on runaway school bus costs.
In fact, rather than crack down on contractors to hold down costs, district officials and the board shifted the burden to parents, kids and classrooms. They took money from other programs to pay school bus operators, increased the distance from school that a bus rider had to live, and raised the per-day rates that parents had to pay, a Civil Beat review of five years of Board of Education minutes found.
At least three former board members — John Penebacker, Breene Harimoto and former chairman Garrett Toguchi — repeatedly questioned department officials about what was going on with transportation costs, the minutes reflect. But they were told the bus companies could not be forced to compete against each other.
"Every year we were increasing the budget for transportation, to the point that we were taking money from other sources because we didn't have enough money to cover it," said Breene Harimoto, a Board of Education member from 2002 to 2010. "I wanted the bus companies to provide justification for why their costs were increasing. Other board members felt there was no option, so we just paid what they asked."
