About All Those School Buses
DART cuts our bus routes ... but don't we already have a bus fleet of our own?
We pay a ton of money for public schools in America. Taxpayers pay nearly $1 trillion for K-12 schools. That’s over $20,000 per student, nationally.
Texas is a bit more sane, with an average in 2023 of only $15,000 per student.
Does it really cost fifteen grand to educate a kiddo? Something tells me Kiah Lucas didn’t demand the equivalent of $300,000 for the 20 students from the early settlement of Kit that he taught in the Union Bower schoolhouse:
The Irving ISD spends gobs of taxpayer dollars collected in property taxes.
How much?
A higher percentage than the entire City of Irving, it turns out:
What do the schools spend the money on?
Buses, for one thing.
Irving ISD pays $11 million a year for school buses. It also just opened a new Transportation and Logistics Center on Pioneer Drive next to the historic Sowers Cemetery.
What can you get for $11 million a year?
With the 225 and 255 buses just ending their routes, we know that bus routes cost $2.16 million each. So, for $11 million, we could have five public buses circling Irving all day. They could offer "tripper” service — an extra route to get the kiddos to class and back home again, but not just limited to the tots, and giving the rest of us lifts around town.
Forget school buses and just give kids transit passes. That doesn’t work in rural areas, but it’s what NYC and Chicago do. It’s also the direction the US is moving towards: starting this school year, Houston ISD is doing it for high school students.
Doesn’t it seem smart? Maintaining yellow bus fleets is a costly headache. When Europeans come to the US and see how we do it, they laugh at us.
Of course there would be major logistical challenges. Irving ISD has 38 schools and transports 7,500 students on 102 school bus routes daily, so five city buses wouldn’t cut it. Plus there are other issues, like safety. With rideshare apps leading to a precipitous decline in DART riders, those who can pay more will gladly use the convenience of door-to-door service, without walking, waiting, and transferring. Our citizens using DART includes very few commuters — only 2,000 folks in Irving depend on DART; we could purchase each of them a new 2025 BMW 2‑Series every year with the money! — and with regular ridership in decline, there’s been an uptick in crime throughout the DART system. There have been five homicides in the last twelve months, and six weeks ago a 28-year old was shot by a rando at a DART station. Young people who use DART once report never wanting to repeat the experience ever again. Here’s a grown man who reported on his misadventures. Not something we want to subject our tots to.
However, think about this idea in reverse. If we already have the facility and all those buses, what would be the marginal cost of using some of those buses as city buses? $15 million? That is the total amount for all DART bus routes in Irving before the recent cut. It is also an order of magnitude lower from what we will soon be paying DART.
Putting aside the thought experiment, the point is we don’t even think about doing this. We just tax for the ISD, and tax for City, and tax for DART, and all of it is uncoordinated and just taxation on autopilot. DART doesn’t work with our council. Irving ISD school board and the city council don’t talk to each other or coordinate anything. The taxes flow in and get spent and everyone gets paid. Meanwhile people who need to get around use rideshares, which may turn into robotaxis at some point.
The lack of coordination is remarkable when you think about it. Alexis de Tocqueville nailed it two centuries ago when he said this about American democracy:
The poor are maintained, immense sums are annually devoted to public instruction, all services whatsoever are remunerated, and the most subordinate agents are liberally paid. If this kind of government appears to me to be useful and rational, I am nevertheless constrained to admit that it is expensive.
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Let's see: point #1- all Irving ISD school buses are full. Tons of families use our school bus system.
#2- this 'analysis' completely ignores the fact that pulling out of DART means no trains as well as buses.
#3- parents feel safe putting their children even as young as pre-k students on school buses because they know that school bus drivers are district employees who have been vetted with background checks.
Look, I know that the goal of the Families for Irving PAC which is linked to MAGA politics and the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 wants all of education to be privatized and wants no taxpayer dollars funding anything even public transportation. But I think you'll find that the citizens of Irving want to stay in the DART system. They want those options. And the fact remains that most Irving children are educated by Irving ISD, and the parents are happy with the school busing system that has literally been around and been important for families for decades.