Hello boys and girls! In today's edition of Sniffles' Soapbox, we'll be discussing the FCBOE and school busses!

Roughly 10%...one out of ten...people employed by our beloved Board of Education are involved with School Bus fleet.
At last count we had:

• 223 School Bus drivers
• 2 Transportation executives
• 13 Bus Mechanics (including the infamous $93K mechanic)
• 85 nebulous "other transporation personnel"

out of about 3500 employees.

Their collective salaries are right at $4 million dollars. (Note: I'm using 2007 dollars, for reasons explained later)

The total amount spent on bus transporation per year in Fayette County is $7.8 million dollars, which presumably includes salaries and new bus purchases, but not depreciation.

With 22,000 students, that works out to roughly $360 per student per year in Fayette county.

Now, the state of Georgia requires public school systems to pick up all non-disabled students over 1.5 miles away from school. Therefore, bus coverage is largely a fixed cost (number of square miles in a county to be covered), with some variable cost (primarily gas and excessive numbers of students on certain routes) mixed in. Remember: state law requires you to send a bus to the far reaches of the county even if only one student is riding it!

On to the fun part: OUTSOURCING!

I looked into two school systems in Georgia that have outsourced their school bus infrastructure to private companies. These counties are Muscogee (Columbus) and Chatham (Savannah).

These counties outsourced all the drivers, the mechanics, the record keeping clerks, the school bus facility, the receptionists, the parts department clerks and inventory...everything.

Now the most interesting comparison to me (trying to be as apples-to-apples here) is Fayette to Muscogee. Fayette has 197 miles of bus coverage, Muscogee has 210. Muscogee has more children but remember, coverage area drives the number of busses.

Muscogee county's outsourced cost is $290 per student per year, $70 per student less than Fayette!

(Source: CAFR 2007 audits of Fayette and Muscogee BOE)

And if you really want to go all out, Chatham county Savannah invested tremendous amounts of money into both outsourcing school buses and implementing a state-of-the-art cost tracking system. This cost tracking system gave Chatham tremendous leverage in negotiating transportation contracts, they knew the cost per student per school to the nickel.

Bottom line? Chatham county's outsourced cost is $250 per student per year, $110 per student less than Fayette county AND they have roughly 3 times as much area to cover!!

Here's the kicker: when gas prices skyrocketed 300% in 2008, Chatham's cost per student only rose 10%!

Benefits to outsourcing include:

• 10% less workload in recruiting and human resources
• no facility cost for school bus garage

Potential problems with outsourcing include:

• loss of 350 public school employees may have significant impact on BOE reelection chances. Given the fact that the margin of victory was roughly 1000 votes each for Smola and Smith, a loss of 350 votes would make potential winning margins 650 or less
• Janet Smola would no longer be able to provide county resources to the Great American Air Show at cost

I'm not saying outsourcing school busses in Fayette is the way to go...but I do think we should look into it.