P-J file photo by Cameron Hurst

In the infancy of New York state’s response to the initial spread of COVID-19, school districts were tasked with expanding their services beyond the brick and mortar of their buildings and classrooms.

Their means? School buses.

From March to June, bus drivers played a key role in helping to ensure students could continue their education by delivering the packets and technology needed for school work. They also delivered to-go meals to students and families to make sure that they would be fed.

But last Friday, school districts learned that they would not receive their normally allotted transportation aid due to a specific provision in the state Education Law that only offers reimbursement for the “actual costs incurred in physically transporting students to/from school.”

“I’m not totally surprised. … I’m just highly disappointed,” Southwestern Central School Superintendent Maureen Donahue said of the memo at a board of education meeting on Tuesday.

“We were led to believe and were told, ‘Keep your bus drivers because this may be only a couple weeks. You don’t want to lay your bus drivers off,'” she said. “We were all fearful of losing our drivers.”

“The numbers part is less of an aggravating factor than the ethics of it for me,” said Jamestown Public Schools Superintendent Kevin Whitaker. “The governor was pretty clear that we needed to continue to provide services for kids. This is something that we would want to do anyway. … Then, to turn around 7 months later and not reimburse us for it — that’s the ethical problem that I’ve got.”

“If there was no COVID and we said we weren’t going to transport our kids, then I would fully expect the Division of Budget not to give us our aid,” he added. “This was a pandemic and an emergency and we were told by the governor to close. It changes the game. He has the authority over all the laws in the state and to change that seems disingenuous.”

Rural school districts who bus a majority of their students, like Pine Valley and Sherman, rely heavily on transportation aid.

“We’re about 100 square miles,” Michael Ginestre, Sherman Central School Superintendent told The Post-Journal. “Students are on our bus for 50 minutes to an hour. … We rely on that to operate. When you make cuts across the board to state aid, it just really hurts those who rely on it to operate.”

“In a district like ours, 31% of our kids don’t have access to the internet and 37% couldn’t drive to access meals,” said Bryna Booth, Pine Valley’s superintendent. “We needed our buses and didn’t just use our buses to deliver our meals: we used our buses to deliver USB thumb drives or paper-based instruction depending on the material in order to give our kids access to their teachers.”

Ginestre and Donahue believe they were misled — not only were districts mandated by Gov. Andrew Cuomo to make sure that meal programs and educational services continued, districts who additionally received CARES (Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security) Act funding were encouraged not to lay off employees during the spring.

“We used our people to do a mandated service and if we didn’t do that service, our kids wouldn’t have eaten during that time,”Ginestre said. “This is another example of the state pulling back on that money that we were expecting. We’re talking about feeding students in need in a very desperate and tough time and the state says, ‘Sorry, you’re on your own.'”

“I thought that was a good faith effort at what we tried to do in the spring,” Donahue said. “I thought that there would be some level of cut to it, some level of money that would come off of that. That’s not what we’re looking at.”

The loss in aid for those months amounts to $220,000 for Pine Valley, $178,000 for Southwestern and $80,000 for Sherman.

David O’Rourke, district superintendent and chief executive officer at Erie 2-Chautauqua-Cattaraugus BOCES, said that it’s “understandable why school districts feel surprised and misled.”

“They operated in good faith to provide services with a staff that they had on-hand, relying on the resources that the state would typically provide to support those staff,” O’Rourke said, explaining that it’s a “fair assumption” that this holdback could be from the lack of federal stimulus funds and looming 20% state aid reduction that Cuomo hopes will address the state’s budget problems.

“How the federal stimulus might be allocated might affect the decision of the state,” he said. “But the lack of a bill coming out of the Senate is certainly a root-cause problem for the current situation. It has a tangible and immediate impact on schools and communities in this region.”

“There are lobbying efforts underway to create the statutory ability for transportation aid to reimburse districts for some of these costs,” he added. “I know that there has been discussion among the Board of Regents on promoting such a bill that would allow the payment of transportation aid for the past year.”

The memo that districts received on Friday from NYSED’s chief financial officer, Phyllis Morris, alluded to that legislation, saying that part of its 2021-22 budget and legislative initiatives is to advance proposals that would amend the law to be reimbursed for pandemic-related costs from last spring.

In a statement to The Post-Journal and the Observer, Freeman Klopott, spokesman for the New York State Division of Budget, also said the division is looking into such an amendment.

“While not allowed under current law, we are considering options for reimbursing districts for important pandemic transportation services such as delivery of meals and instructional materials to students,” he said.

Legislation that would amend the Education Law to authorize “school districts to use school transportation aid to pay for the cost and expenses of transporting and delivering meals, homework materials and any other school materials to students during COVID-19,” proposed by New York state Sen. Rachel May, a Syracuse Democrat, did pass unanimously in the state Senate in July. But, according to the bill’s status on the Senate’s website, it has yet to be voted on in the Assembly.

“Schools provided this vital service at great expense in a time of scarce resources,” May tweeted out on Thursday. “This is why (Assemblyman Al Stirpe) and I introduced our bill to unequivocally qualify these expenses for reimbursement. @NYSenate passed it. Next year, we will get it done.”

Still, fear looms, especially as coronavirus cases increase throughout the region, as to how districts will be expected to react should they be forced to transition to remote learning once again.

“If we have to go remote again, we have to be fiscally responsible to our taxpayers and what does that look like?” Booth said. “We can’t go out there again and be fiscally responsible knowing what we know now.”

“At this point, tell us where we’re going to be so we can deal with it,” Donahue said, in regard to the funding issue.

“We’re operating blind right now and I don’t know how much longer school districts can do that,” Ginestre said. “School districts are in a bind and there’s not much more we can take.”

“It’s just disappointing,” Whitaker added. “All the school districts are going to be impacted by this to varying degrees. It’s symbolic of the way that the state is treating our kids — not symbolic of the way our community feels about our kids, how our drivers feel about our kids. This is how politics comes back to hurt kids.”

“We did right by families the first time — we made sure they were fed and taken care of and got the materials they needed,” Booth added. “This time we’re going to have difficulty doing that if we are forced to be remote again. We need to be creative if we don’t get that transportation aid — and I just don’t know what that looks like.”