ELIZABETHTOWN |The fourth school merger committee meeting last week focused on transportation systems at Westport Central and Elizabethtown-Lewis Central schools.
The meeting follows three prior sessions held since August to discuss enrollment, instruction/extracurricular programs, and facilities data.
The December session pulled statistics from state Transportation Advisory Services records for comparison.
While some corresponding figures related to busing and equipment were similar, as generally revealed in prior discussions, others showed some differences.
For example, costs spent per mile to bus students are similar in both districts, at 25 cents per mile for ELCS and 19 cents per mile at WCS.
While ELCS travels annually about 125,000 miles, Westport’s buses travel about 96,000.
That is due in part to differences in district size. With two towns, Elizabethtown and Lewis, sharing one school, ELCS encompasses 173.5 square miles. Westport covers 70.2 square miles.
State transportation aid ratios are also different, with ELCS gaining 62.4 percent aid from the state and Westport aid at 46.9.
Sam Sherman, a Westport businessman who sits on the merger committee, asked what numbers feed the aid ratio.
Education consultant Bill Silky, of the firm Castallo & Silky LLC hired to facilitate the merger study, said the total number of students and miles traveled factor into a complex transportation aid formula.
“And then they built in a wealth factor,” Silky said.
According to state education department online resources, income wealth is based on “adjusted gross income of residents of the district, as reported on tax returns and including the results of the statewide computerized income verification process.”
Beyond aid, transportation operating costs come in quite similar for both districts.
At ELCS, expenditures are $3.31 per mile with Westport costs calculated at $3.18 per mile.
Westport utilizes eight buses, with ELCS using 11 buses. The make and model of vehicles purchased by the schools are different, with Elizabethtown-Lewis’s fleet primarily Dodge, International and TransTech while Westport’s buys mostly Bluebird, Chevrolet and GMC buses.
Route data in the presentation was fairly general.
Several members of the merger committee asked if consultants provide detailed analysis of bus routes, looking for precise information about student pick-up times, route overlap, and whether travel would mean long bus rides for individual students.
Silky said that type of analysis is to be done by district school boards and administrators if the schools choose to merge.
But their review, presented by consultant Suzanne Gilmour, did look at some scenarios. They found that bus runs begin at 6:30 and 6:45 for ELCS and Westport drivers respectively.
And ELCS buses run 46 to 55 miles per day, total (to and from), not including the trip to CV-Tech, while Westport buses run 45 to 135 miles per day, not including sports runs.
For discussion purposes, consultants looked at how a single-run busing route in a merger might operate.
Single-run refers to a transportation schedule that picks up elementary and middle-high school children at the same time.
A single-run busing route would continue to pick up students as they do now, Gilmour said.
But an added step would shuttle middle school kids from ELCS to the Westport building, bringing Westport high schoolers back to ELCS. The shuttle step might add about 10 minutes to both morning and afternoon bus routes, Gilmour said.
An option, consultants said in discussion, is a dual system or two-tier bus run, establishing separate travel routes for elementary and middle-high school students.
Consultants said the difficulty in scheduling would likely be finding bus drivers here to accommodate the need for two drivers with an added 1.5 hours per week for shuttle runs.
BUSING DETAILS
Transportation logistics remained a real concern to committee members and to some of the 15 people who attended the meeting held in Elizabethtown last Wednesday.
Deb Spaulding, lead bus driver at ELCS, suggested there may be ways to coordinate stops at points where Westport and ELCS routes connect.
“I’m going by Westport buses two times, three times a day,” she explained.
District routes interlace on roads that loop between Westport and Lewis and Elizabethtown.
“There are places where we could switch over,” Spaulding said, putting middle school kids en route directly to Westport, and vice-versa for high school students.
“In theory,” Sherman said, “both schools have a handle on transportation; both schools have a handle on sports schedules. We probably could really put together a pretty good scenario if they (transportation personnel) sat down.”
“We could certainly ask if they would go for that,” Gilmour said.
The idea seemed to settle well with committee members.
ELCS physical education teacher and athletic director Paul Buehler, who is on the committee, suggested specifics now might better inform any merger decision.
“Do we need a subcommittee to hammer out bus routes and get an idea of data for people?”
Consultants will take up that option for added review in the coming weeks.
Buehler also said he felt like merger committee review was a lot of “studying ourselves.”
And he described how he reached out to other schools in New York who worked on consolidation plans. One very similar and successful merger happened in 1995 at Chautauqua Lake and Mayville Central School over by Lake Erie.
One district is on a beautiful lake, the other is the county seat there, Buehler said.
“I asked them: Tell me what went wrong?” Buehler said.
Among challenges relayed by school administrators, he said, were combining teacher contracts, staffing issues and transportation routes.
But more variety in courses was achieved there, he said.
ELCS Superintendent Scott Osborne shared an article published in 2008 in the Westfield Republican that actually debriefed school board members involved in that merger — 12 years after it went into effect.
The Chautauqua Lake school’s board members recalled confidence in the process.
“We’ve got a lot of cool stuff going on that we never, never could have done without a merger,” board member Jay Baker said in the news report.
“The Chautauqua Lake Central School District has consistently ranked among the top school districts in the region and has one of the lowest pupil-teacher ratios. ... the district was able to introduce 46 new programs in the first few years post-merger.”
Transportation issues were one part of the merger that took a lot of time, according to the news account.
Notes and the Castallo & Silky December 6 presentation are posted online at both schools and on the Town of Lewis webpage.
An update to property valuation was included in last week’s data sheets.
The assessed values — value placed by local assessors — is disparate.
ELCS facilities assessed value is $7,145,500 with Westport facilities assessed at $2,904,200.
The school in Elizabethtown was built in 1951 and Westport’s school was built in 1933.
WHAT’S NEXT?
There are three Merger Committee meetings left:
Jan. 24 to discuss staffing: 6 p.m. at Westport Central School
Feb. 28 to discuss finances: 6 p.m. at Elizabethtown-Lewis Central School.
April 25 to review findings and read Draft Final Report: 6 p.m. at Westport Central School.
In June, a final report would be submitted to the State Education Department for review.
If approved there, it would then go to Westport and ELCS School Boards in August 2018 and brought to public information sessions in September.
The merger review process will continue through the 2018 school year into 2019 and requires three rounds of separate votes at both School Boards, a straw poll vote in both communities and a final formal referendum vote in Jan. 2019.
If the schools vote to merge, a new combined school board would be elected during the school vote in May 2019.
WCS: westportcs.org
ELCS: www.elcsd.org
Town of Lewis: www.lewisny.com
