No Fuel for Schools: Districts Cut Back

June 24, 2008 — -- Students as young as 5 may soon be forced to walk more than a mile to kindergarten in one Maryland County that is struggling to fill its school bus gas tanks in the face of rising oil prices.

"When we budgeted for the 2009 school year the price of fuel was $2.75," Chris Cram, the public information officer for the Montgomery Country School Board, told ABCNEWS.com. "Now it's much, much higher."

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"We'll begin the school year with a fuel budget deficit of $5.362 million," said Cram, who added that the suburban D.C. county has the 13th largest bus fleet in the nation, transporting 96,000 students daily. "It's a huge problem."

Gas prices in the county have been well beyond $4 a gallon, according to Cram, who said the 1,275 buses used by the schools daily aren't exactly fuel efficient: One bus averages 6.1 miles per gallon, and the entire fleet travels about 100,000 miles per day.

While nothing has been decided yet, Cram said that the school board will meet this week to vote on whether the schools' superintendent should be permitted to alter the county's policy on which students receive free transportation to school via bus and which should be expected to walk, or locate other means of transportation.

As it stands, high schoolers must live more than 2 miles away from school, middle schoolers more than 1.5 miles, and elementary school students more than 1 mile in order to be eligible to ride the bus, Cram said.

Barring special circumstances — including extremely busy streets in the area or special needs — all other Montgomery County students who live closer to their schools must walk or find their own rides.

Indeed, as gas prices continue to rise, so do the number of school districts that are starting to amend their longstanding policies in an effort to ease the pain at the pump.

The community colleges in North Carolina, for instance, are seeing the negative effects of rising fuel prices with more and more students figuring out ways to take as many classes in as few days as possible, cutting down on the number of times they must drive to campus each week.