Three hours is too long
Posted on Friday, June 2, 2006
URL: http://www.nwanews.com/adg/Editorial/156412/
Ihad to do a double take when I read it.
The quotation marks were there, signifying a verbatim response. The attribution was there, complete with title. Everything was in place, but I still couldn’t believe what I was reading. Doug Eaton, the director of public school facilities and transportation in Arkansas, was quoted as telling a reporter that parents who were complaining about long bus rides resulting from forced consolidation had another option for their children. “If they don’t like to ride the bus, move closer to the school,” he reportedly said. And if some children in our impoverished state don’t have enough bread, let them eat cake ?
That last phrase is the most (in ) famous thing Marie Antoinette never said, and one can only hope that Eaton’s quip was similarly misstated, misquoted or at least taken out of context. Surely no one would set out in a news interview to come across so uncaring and elitist as to suggest that rural residents’ constitutional right to an adequate education requires that they up and move to larger cities.
Eaton might as well have finished his sentence with “Why would anyone want to hang on to a tiny little school anyway ?” Already the feeling among many rural residents is that big-city bureaucrats condescendingly scoff at small schools. A statement like the one attributed to Eaton confirms their worst fears.
The particular school being discussed in this instance is in Paron in Saline County, whose district was annexed by Bryant in 2004. After Bryant’s school board voted this past April to close Paron High School, some Paron patrons sued to keep their school open.
As if he hadn’t said enough, Eaton also remarked on the lawsuit’s claim that academic performance suffers when children have to endure excessive bus rides.
“I think anybody would be extremely, extremely hard pressed to draw a parallel between a child’s inability to read and write and how long they’ve sat on a bus,” he was quoted as saying.
The hope is that Eaton had momentarily fallen prey to the paranoia that sometimes grips urbanites about rural patrons, which is that “long bus rides” is merely a code-word excuse to keep poorly run, inefficient and underperforming small schools open.
What anybody would be extremely hard pressed to do is separate long bus rides from ill effects on a child’s education and general well-being. Common sense tells us that at some point a bus ride is too long; the challenge is determining that point.
Two or three hours spent on a bus is two or three hours not spent in class or with family. For younger children, especially, the thought of riding a bus for three hours to get four or five hours of instruction stretches sensibility.
Transportation costs are measured in both dollars and time, affecting schools, students and parents, and by virtue of their enormity ought to be studied for positive efficiency and negative impact. Yet the most credible study on the correlation between academic performance and long bus rides was done more than 30 years ago.
Conducted in Oklahoma in 1973, it showed a statistically significant negative effect on student achievement from long bus rides. But as busing emerged as a means to achieve racial integration in schools, not only was that study demagogically attacked, but so was the very idea of suggesting anything negative about long bus rides.
A venerable case study exists, however, in our sister state of West Virginia. Small, rural and poor like Arkansas, West Virginia embarked upon an aggressive consolidation plan 15 years ago, closing 300 schools in 12 years—one out of every five. Another ™ schools were scheduled to be closed by 2010.
In an in-depth news series, the Charleston Gazette investigated the promises of consolidation against the reality 12 years later. It’s a textbook example of how not to improve rural education.
Total public school enrollment fell by 40, 000 during the consolidation of the 1990 s, but administrative costs (i. e., superintendents and such ) actually went up. Despite busing 25, 000 fewer kids, transportation costs nearly doubled during the decade. West Virginia now leads the nation in percentage of education budget spent (wasted, many say ) on transportation.
With fuel prices, liability insurance and bus driver salaries continuing to rise, the Gazette reported that transportation costs drain resources from teachers and classrooms. Even worse, thousands of kids are riding buses far longer than the state had assured parents would be the case. Laws enacted to limit bus rides according to reasonable adult commutes, the national average of which is only 26 minutes, went ignored and unenforced.
When the Gazette interviewed children forced to endure long rides over gravel and hilly terrain, it found that “students with long rides say they are stressed and exhausted. Their grades slump. They participate in fewer after-school activities. They have less time to spend with their parents.”
“Long bus rides also are bad for children’s health, recent studies have shown,” the article continued. “Students who spend hours in the morning and afternoon slumped in bus seats are more likely to develop respiratory illnesses.” The opportunity for leadership here is for someone in authority—or campaigning to be in authority—to turn the whole discussion around by asking a novel question: All sacred cows, agendas and jerry-rigging aside, what’s the best way to educate a rural population ? We need to think outside the bus. Maybe that’s what Doug Eaton was trying to say all along.
—–––––•–––––—Dana D. Kelley is a free-lance writer from Jonesboro.