CCISD budget issues: Non-mandatory transportation

Clear Creek ISD's budget challenges have made the news recently, sometimes dramatically, and a citizens' committee was appointed to help identify the most palatable cost cuts.

There is a "town hall" meeting tonight at 6 p.m. at Clear Springs High School to discuss the options put forth by the committee.  If I were a better blogger without a "real" job demanding my time and focus, I might have re-posted this information with more advance notice.

Some of the service reductions proposed by the committee appear to be solidly within diminishing-returns territory when assessed from a community perspective.  I chose to focus on transportation-related issues in rendering my feedback to the committee, because that is an issue that I know from personal experience.  CCISD can indeed reduce its budget by eliminating busing services that it is not required by law to provide, but the corresponding cost to local families would be incredibly high - penny-wise for them becomes pound-foolish for us.  For this reason, I think it makes more sense to develop a means by which CCISD could be compensated for providing those non-mandatory services.

Blogger does not yet support content hosting, so in order to share my feedback on this blog, I have to embed my letter and supporting calculations as two photographs.  Click on each one to enlarge so that you can read.  And check out those numbers.  Note that these are only costs associated with one example group of students being transported to one Magnet school program from one location.   If these types of impacts were integrated over every family in the ISD and for every type of non-mandatory busing, the financial impacts to the community would indeed be remarkable.

Incidentally, this document is redacted but I do not mind sharing my identity if you contact me personally.  I don't want my ID to become associated with this blog NOT because I have anything to hide, but because it would likely cause a confound with my professional on-line identity.