SCHOOL BOARD TO INTERVIEW, ADD MEMBER
HEMET Hemet school board members are expected to appoint a new trustee when they meet Tuesday.
Nine candidates will be interviewed beginning at 3 p.m. The person selected will be sworn in before the regularly scheduled meeting at 6:30 p.m.
The applicants hope to replace Lisa DeForest, who resigned in February because she moved out of the Hemet Unified School District. The term runs until December 2016.
The candidates are: Anthony Connell, John Graham, Heather Hughes, Sandra Males-Madrid, Curt Nordal, Tammy Rivers, Keith Rossi, Christian Ruddell and Patrick Searl. The interviews, which are open to the public, will be at the district office, 1791 W Acacia Ave., Hemet.
– Craig Shultz
BY CRAIG SHULTZ
For more than 20 years, parents have had to pay for their children to ride buses to Hemet schools. But that may change. School bus rides would be free under a proposal that will come before the school board Tuesday. Costs would be covered by money the Hemet Unified School District earns by providing transportation services to other districts. Hemet earns more than $1.7 million annually in additional revenue by busing students in more than 40 other districts in Southern California. Besides eliminating charges, walking distances would be shortened by onehalf mile under the proposal, allowing more of the district’s 21,000 students to get a ride to school. The change would be effective with the start of the 2015-16 school year in August. Currently, it costs up to $520 per student for an annual pass, although low-income families pay less, and most students with special needs cannot be charged to ride the bus under federal law. Even if parents want to pay for busing, many can’t as students must live at least 2.5 miles from their elementary schools or 5 miles from their middle or high schools to qualify for busing. School board member Joe Wojcik said he’d like to see the distances shortened. “I’d prefer more than a half-mile,” he said. “Two (miles) for elementary and 3.5 in high school.” As the Hemet Unified transportation department has expanded its operations, Wojcik has advocated using the busing cash locally. “If we’re contracting all of these services to other districts, our district should receive some of that upside as well,” he said last week. Hemet provides hometo-school busing for districts such as San Jacinto, Perris Union, Romoland, Nuview and Perris Elementary, as well as districts as far away as Los Angeles. Eliminating fees will cost the district $750,000 per year, according to a report that transportation director Mike Fogerty will present to trustees. It will necessitate adding seven new routes, Fogerty reports. Buses cost $165,000 apiece, and $60,000 per year is needed for the driver’s salary, maintenance, fuel and support services. Administrators believe by eliminating fees, more students will ride the bus – and more will attend school, which means more money for HUSD from the state. Wojcik said 80 percent of the students in the district come from families considered low income. “We have a lot of families with transportation needs who this should help,” he said. “It’s a double windfall. It helps our families out and at the same time increases our average daily attendance.” School districts in California started charging for busing after a state Supreme Court ruled in the early 1980s that school busing is not a right. Soon after, the state froze the level of funding provided to school districts for transportation, forcing districts to pay the rest of the costs from their general funds. Hemet, which started collecting bus fees in 1992, is one of the largest districts in the state geographically at 750 square miles, stretching east into the San Jacinto Mountain communities of Idyllwild and Anza, south to Sage and Aguanga and west to Winchester. The change would apply just to home-to-school transportation. There will continue to be charges for athletic teams and other extracurricular activities that involve transportation. CONTACT THE WRITER: 951-368-9086 or [email protected] IF YOU GO
What:Hemet Unified School District trustees to discuss eliminating busing fee. When:6:30 p.m. Tuesday Where:District office, 1791 W. Acacia Ave.