The Newton Tab reports that at last week’s City Council meeting dedicated to passing the city’s annual $500+ million dollar annual operating budget, the council got hung up for hours over discussion about eliminating school bus fees.

A resolution was considered to cut $500K from the budget, the amount raised by student bus fees, to force the administration to find that money elsewhere and eliminate the fees.  There was a proposed non-binding resolution urging the Mayor to find replacement sources of money.   After hours of debate, the vote ended in a tie, meaning that the resolution did not pass.

Despite the resolution not passing, it sounds like the Council cares a lot about this issue and may continue to pursue it via other means.

My personal take is that bus fees are a budgetary cheat.   Each town has a statutory obligation to provide free public education for all its citizens.  A school department may decide that there are financial or programmatic advantages in building a few bigger central schools rather than more neighborhood schools.  That’s fine.  But if they do so, and the schools are far from the students, they shouldn’t be able to offload the transportation costs onto parents.   That additional cost of getting the students to/from those schools should be factored in to the city’s budget just like all the other costs.