Some board members questioned the cost, but the board unanimously approved the $1.4 million purchase requisition to the RTA.
Board member William Bailey asked if Dayton Public is the only organization paying the increased fee and Dayton Public transportation leaders said other public organizations who buy bus passes in bulk are charged the same amount.
Bailey said the cost savings from paying the $60 price per month instead of the $85 would be significant, more than $400,000.
“That’s a lot of money,” Bailey said.
Add to that the money that the district is paying its own student resource officers to be downtown in the bus hub to help prevent fights and keep students safe and it’s even more significant, said Marvin Jones, Dayton Public’s business manager. The district has said before they pay about $35,000 a month for SROs in the downtown Dayton RTA hub, downtown Dayton branch of the library and the Southeast branch of the library.
The $1.4 million purchase for the Greater Dayton RTA passes rekindled the board’s conversation around whether yellow buses should bus high school students in Dayton or if the district should continue to pay additional fees to use RTA buses. Currently, Dayton Public distributes bus passes to high school students rather than busing them on yellow buses.
Under state law, Dayton must bus all the students living in Dayton city limits in grades kindergarten through eighth grade who live more than two miles from their school. That includes charter and private schools. For a district like Dayton Public, this amounts to a dizzying number of routes each morning.
DPS superintendent David Lawrence and previous superintendent Elizabeth Lolli both repeated a plea to charter and private schools to stagger start their days so they could more easily get students to school. But under state law, the district has to get their students to school within 30 minutes of the start of the school day and pick them up within 30 minutes of the end of the day, which means the district is not in a bargaining position.
“We need help legislatively with this issue around transporting charter school students,” Lawrence said.
If DPS didn’t have to bus charter school students, it would be possible to bus high school students, he said.
Board president Will Smith said he would like to continue to investigate solutions to this problem, and noted there couldn’t be a one-size-fits-all solution to all the local schools.
“It’s on us to be creative sometimes,” Smith said.
Neveah Woods, a student at Ponitz Career Technology Center and the student body vice president, rides the RTA to school. She thinks it would be better if the district went back to yellow buses for high school students.
Students are often late because their RTA buses are late, she said, and they get in trouble for something that isn’t their fault. She said she does not always feel safe on the RTA bus or at the downtown bus hub, which she goes to every morning to get to her school.
“I really feel like riding the RTA equals attendance issues,” she said.
Lawrence said the district is not currently using yellow buses to get high school students to school because they don’t have enough buses or enough drivers.
The district additionally signed a memorandum of understanding with Local 627, the district’s bus driver’s union, which is meant to resolve some of the issues that bus drivers said were going wrong, such as late payments on attendance bonuses. In October, Dayton Public Schools bus drivers said they were still struggling to get paid correctly and on time almost a year after the bus drivers’ union president, Marie Winfrey, first brought up the issue in November 2023.
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