|
Rural school district adds a bus run to midtown Tracy for its charter high school students.
 Press file photo
The one-way run will cost the city about $5,000 for fuel
this coming school year. The bus will arrive at 8:30 every morning and run on
natural gas.
District officials are unsure about how many students will
opt to ride it. But for a rural district 10 miles out of town, the added line is
one more way to reach out to a city that feeds Delta Charter
High School about 75
percent of its students.
Unlike traditional high schools, which get students based on
where they live, charter schools have to market themselves to the public.
For every student the district recruits to its charter high
school, it gets about $5,300 in the state’s per-pupil funding, according to
last-available figures.
“Even if we just get three or four more students, it’s worth
it to us,” Superintendent Dave Thoming said.
Charter schools get the state average in per-student
funding, which turns out to be about $300 less per student than Tracy Unified
School District gets.
But because charter schools have less overhead, the money
goes farther, Thoming stressed.
Typically, students spend four hours three or four days a
week at the school taking core classes, or more, depending on their electives.
The 750-student New Jerusalem district already picks up and
drops off about 40 or 50 kindergarten-through-eighth-graders every school day
at 7:30 a.m. with its other bus — which runs on diesel — from the Tracer bus
stop at Tracy Boulevard and Schulte Road. Students bound for the roughly
500-student Delta Charter school will use the same stop when the district’s
first on-site school day starts Aug. 25.
New Jerusalem Elementary students start on Aug. 13 with
other traditional schools.
For the two-way trip to bus the traditional elementary and
middle schoolers, the district pays $8,000 to $10,000 a year for fuel and
maintenance, Thoming said. That’s not counting bus drivers’ pay.
Eventually, the district looks to add a new bus to its
two-bus fleet using $85,000 recently awarded from the state. But Thoming said
he’s still looking for $40,000 or $50,000 in matching funds to buy the bus.
Thoming said the district is still debating whether to make
the new high-school route round-trip.
In the meantime though, he said he hopes parents will take
advantage of the new line to save at least half the gas money they’d normally
spend to drive their kids to the outskirts of town.
“We’re confident that there are people out there who could
use that help,” he said. “Hopefully, this will give people who otherwise
wouldn’t attend Delta Charter a chance to come.”
• To reach Tracy Press
reporter Jennifer Wadsworth, call 830-4225 or e-mail her at
This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
.
Trackback(0)
 |
TrackBack URI for this entry
Subscribe to this comment's feed
Show/Hide comments
Dave