What could attorney general's Columbus private school busing suit mean for Northeast Ohio schools?

Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost filed a lawsuit on Sept. 5 challenging Columbus City School District's practice of paying families of non-public schools instead of transporting them to school. Districts like Akron and Cleveland, which have been following the same practice for decades, may want to take note.

Ohio has a law that's been on the books for decades that requires public school districts to transport charter and private school students to their schools. One section of the law also allows schools to provide payments to families in lieu of transporting them when it is "impractical" to do so.

School districts in Northeast Ohio have recently approved or debated measures to offer those payments, while others have done so for years, citing the burden caused by transporting students, especially in recent times with districts facing challenges finding bus drivers and other financial pressures.

Yost in the lawsuit alleges Columbus City School District is not following the law , by failing to give parents adequate notice 30 days before school starts that their kids would not be transported by the district. He also faulted the district for allegedly failing to provide transportation while the parents await mediation on the determination that transporting their kids would be impractical.

"As a parent and grandparent, I understand the importance of making sure every child has a safe way to get to and from school," Yost said in a press release. "These families have a right to choose what school is best for their child, and the law is clear that transportation is to be provided. The School Board needs to comply with the law whether they agree with it or not."

Cleveland Metropolitan School District sent out notices to families of non-public school students about the district's inability to transport them on July 29, spokesperson Candice Grose said, roughly a month before most of those schools were set to start their fall semester.

The CMSD Board of Education typically approves a resolution each year that will reimburse parents for the transportation, which "lags" the previous year, meaning parents are being reimbursed after a year of providing transportation to their students. The resolution for the 2023-2024 school year was approved on Aug. 20, 2024, Grose said. That resolution declared 1,739 students were "impractical" to bus, and the board budgeted $1.1 million for payments to families in lieu of transporting them, up to $600 per student.

Akron Public Schools' Board of Education approved a similar resolution in early July, well before school started, but a necessary follow-up resolution was not approved during the board's Sept. 9 meeting; a spokesperson said that resolution is needed to notify parents they can receive payments instead of transportation.

Akron Board of Education members questioned the process in light of the lawsuit in Columbus, including whether contractors would be allowed to do the transportation, instead of providing payments to parents. They also raised concerns about a lack of documentation as to which students would not be transported and when the district actually notified parents.

"I've had community members, residents, voters who have made issues (apparent) regarding parents doing their own transportation for their children due to not having enough time to prepare for it," said board of education member Summer Hall. "Because I think they were told like two weeks before school started that APS would not be transporting (them)."

District spokesperson Mark Williamson said some notices had gone out in late June to families it already knew were attending private or charter schools, well before school started. He added that the resolution the board didn't approve covers the first of six groups of students that the district typically asks for approval on each year, in order to offer payments to families in lieu of transporting their students.

Impractical or necessary?

Public school advocate Steve Dyer, an education policy analyst and former Democratic Ohio state representative, said schools are dealing with an increase in the number of students needing transportation after the expansion of the EdChoice voucher program in Ohio last year, with the state expanding the number of families eligible to take advantage of the program providing financial support for attending private schools.

"Where you're seeing almost twice as many kids taking vouchers than the previous year, that's obviously put a huge strain on public school districts to figure out how to transport these students," he said.

He argued it was already impractical for many school districts to provide transportation to so many non-public school students before the voucher expansion. Students are eligible for transportation as long as their school is 30 minutes or less from their home. Dyer said the state doesn't fully reimburse schools for the costs of transportation.

Districts are required to compensate parents half the cost of transporting a student per year if they choose to pay parents in lieu of transporting them; in Cleveland, for example, it costs about $2,500 per school year to transport students, according to CMSD Board of Education documents.

Aaron Churchill, Ohio research director with the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative education policy think tank, said a close reading of the statutes involved suggests districts should be trying as much as possible to transport all students and only use the payments in lieu of transportation as a last resort.

"One of the issues with the payment in lieu of is it's not going to help a lot of families that need transportation the most," he explained. "And in cities like Cleveland, Youngstown or Akron, they may not have a car. Some families may not have reliable transportation."

He took Columbus City School District to task in a recent column about Yost's lawsuit, noting that the district had been fined before for not providing adequate transportation for private and charter school students, including about $11 million in 2022, when non-public school districts complained about going weeks without transportation for their students.

Dyer alleged Yost's lawsuit is meant to be a political "shot across the bow," a warning to school districts of retribution if they continue with a lawsuit against the voucher system. Akron and Columbus are among several hundred school districts that have joined the lawsuit which is set for trial in November .

How many students are school districts transporting?

Youngstown City School District officials said mid-September that almost half of the school bus-eligible students in the district are non-public school students; 2,887 public school students, compared to 2,556 non-public school students.

Ohio Department of Education data from the 2022-2023 school year shows public schools are responsible for transportation of thousands of non-public school students throughout Northeast Ohio.

Cleveland Metropolitan School District transported the most students total in the state in the 2022-2023 school year, according to the data, 22,759 total; of that, 8,389 came from charter or private schools. It cost about $35 million alone to transport students that year.

Akron transported the second highest number of non-public schools in Northeast Ohio that year, 1,616 students total, compared with 4,277 public school students transported.

Youngstown transported the third most in the 2022-2023 school year, followed by Lorain City School District. Lorain bused essentially an equal number of public and non-public students that year; 646 public school students compared to 636 students attending charter and private schools.