I live in Tucson’s Catalina Foothills School District (CFSD). Because our 60-year-old neighborhood is hilly with narrow, winding roads, full-sized school buses cannot navigate it safely. Consequently, some children—including my kindergartner—must walk up to a mile over dangerous terrain just to reach the nearest bus stop.
CFSD satisfies their mandate to provide busing to families living over a mile from school by placing the bus stop over a mile away from our homes. Irony, anyone? CFSD's solution is for our HOA to pay astronomical engineering costs to widen the roads, yet, state law explicitly allows funding flexibility for smaller buses to address exactly these infrastructure challenges (A.R.S. § 15-922).
So why won't CFSD utilize them? Because open enrollment has poisoned the financial incentives. Rather than investing in smaller buses for local tax-paying residents, CFSD actually spends money sending large buses miles outside district boundaries to recruit open-enrollment students for extra state funding. These are bad incentives.
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SAMUEL ROGERS
Foothills
Disclaimer: As submitted to the Arizona Daily Star.
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