Should Newton Public Schools reduce transportation for private school students to and from private schools? And is that even allowed?

The Newton School Committee is considering those questions as it evaluates the district’s transportation needs and potential changes.

The committee discussed the matter in April, but members decided not to take any action because more information was needed about the district’s requirements. And they thought it was too late in the school year to make changes to transportation this fall.

“This is something that we have done as an institution for quite some time, it’s something that community members have come to expect, and that obviously influences the situation greatly,” School Committee Chair Chris Brezski said Monday night.

But, Brezski added, there are public school students who are denied bus travel while private school student transportation is provided.

“As it exists today, we are providing a service to private school students that we are not providing for public school students,” he said.

As things stand now, the district buses 151 private school students to and from schools all around Newton while denying 350 students transportation because they attend public schools outside their designated areas in the city.

In the zone

That’s because in Newton, a public school student only gets bus transportation to schools within their “zone district.”

A zone district is an area of a city with designated schools for resident kids to attend. Each of Newton’s elementary, middle and high schools has a zone district.

State law requires the district to provide the same transportation options for students in private school within the city as those in public schools. Court rulings have determined that a community can restrict that to private schools within a student’s “zone district” if that’s a policy also covering public students in the district.

With private schools varying in purpose, religious affiliation, special services and more, that can complicate things.

“Just by the sheer nature of Newton being as large as it is, and having a handful of private schools, it results in students who are getting private school transportation going well beyond what the distance would be to their zoned school,” NPS legal counsel Jill Murray Grady said.

That differs from how public school students are limited within zone districts.

Feeling the crunch

There are 151 private school students using transportation services in Newton.

The district’s school buses can legally take up to 77 students, because that’s how many seatbelts the buses have.

“But that’s based on, pardon me, 13-inch tushes,” NPS Transportation Director Regina Moody said. “When you get to middle and high schools, you’re really talking two in a seat.”

High school bus passenger numbers are up this year, Moody said, and now the district has had to turn away public high school students seeking to use the buses.

There are around 350 students in Newton who attend public schools that are outside of their zones districts, for a variety of reasons (not for special education, however), Assistant Superintendent Liam Hurley said, so they must get their own transportation to and from school.

“We had done some analysis last year looking at that and believe that we would need nine or 10 buses to transport those students,” Hurley said.

With buses costing between $118,000 and $120,000 a year to operate and maintain, that would add around $1 million to the district’s transportation budget, Hurly noted.

Going the distance

School committees are required to provide transportation for students who live more than two miles from their schools, Murray Grady said.

Districts can charge a fee for students who live farther than two miles from school, but Newton doesn’t charge that fee to students in grades K through 6. Families of older students have to pay the fee, which is $400 per school year.

The policy is similar for private school students, with one difference.

“The distances that have been used for the private schools are from their home to their private school. So anybody who basically lives outside of the (zone) district that the private school falls in, most of them are exempt from the fee.

“If Horace Mann is in their back yard but they’re going to a school in the south side of Newton, I think you can charge them under the legal analysis that I have,” Murray Grady said.

Of the 151 private school students using bus transportation, only 35 of them are paying the bus fee.

“I think those numbers are very much disproportionate,” Ward 4 School Committee member Tamika Olszewski said, noting that adding 9 or 10 buses at $120,000 per bus per year so those 350 out-of-zone public school students could use the buses amounts to a lot of money.

“Either way you swing it, that’s more money than we currently have,” Olszewski said. “None of us wants to be in a position where we’re accused of being callous or unfeeling about a need of transporting kids to their schools, but there are real practical terms about what this district can sustain in a rational, sustainable financial way.”

Moody, transportation director, said the district is going to need a couple of additional buses just to maintain status quo, but if the district reduces the number of private students to whom it provides transportation, they may be able to make changes to fix problems with public school ridership and perhaps not need to add buses.

If the district were to offer the exact same service to public school students as it offers to private school students, the district would need to add those 10 buses.

“You’re talking 18 square miles, 21 public schools. That’s a lot,” Moody said.

And the fees collected would barely make a dent in the costs, Hurley confirmed.

The School Committee is set to discuss (and perhaps vote on) potential changes to the transportation policy at its next meeting on Nov. 4, after getting more feedback from the community.