The Hemet Unified School District is cashing in by providing transportation services for 42 other districts.
Michael Fogerty does not like to use the term profit.
“We’re a nonprofit organization,” insists Fogerty, the transportation director for the Hemet Unified School District.
But whatever you want to call it, at a time when most school districts are having to cut back on transportation to balance squeakytight budgets, Fogerty’s department is getting bigger and making money.
This year alone, the Hemet district is adding 22 buses to a fleet of 277 and pocketing $1.7 million in what most private businesses would call profit. It is so much money that, combined with $1.5 million in reimbursements from the state, the Hemet district does something few, if any, California school districts can do: It pays for transporting its own students without dipping into general fund money that covers the costs of many other programs.
Hemet students may soon see a more tangible benefit as school district officials look into the possibility of using the extra money to give more students a ride to school.
Hemet does it by providing everything from route planning to buses and drivers for 42 other Southern California school districts, some as far away as Los Angeles.
Contracts with Hemet also save money for the other districts.
The El Monte City School District cut its transportation costs by 14 percent last year by switching from a private vendor to Hemet.
“School districts can join forces and use all of their resources, so this has been a great partnership,” said Kris Olafsson, deputy superintendent for business at the El Monte district.
The San Jacinto Unified School District, one of the first to jump on board Hemet buses, estimated it was saving about $1.5 million per year in a report prepared for a school board study session four years ago.
“We have an excellent plan in place for working with Hemet Unified,” said Richard De Nava, assistant superintendent, business services, for the San Jacinto district.
Saving money for its partners, as Fogerty calls the other districts, is a big part of Hemet’s success.
“It has to be a win-win for each district,” he said. “Obviously, you have to save money for the district that you are providing the service for. It also has to provide some kind of benefit for us to be able to do it.”
Fogerty’s competitors are private transportation companies who charge by the mile driven and by the hour of the driver’s time.
“These private companies fight it out for the best hourly and the best mileage rate they can,” Fogerty said. “What they leave out of that whole concept is, how many pieces of equipment and how many people are you going to actually put on the road?”
Hemet charges a flat fee (field trips run $395 for the first five hours and $75 an hour thereafter) and drivers are routed to other nearby districts as time and distance allows to serve other customers between trips.
“What we do,” Fogerty said, “is we come in and say ‘Here is District A in this area and here is District B in this (nearby) area. Why don’t both of you join with us as a partner and we build a system … that crosses over the geographical boundaries and shares the resources between you two?’ And then we put an actual fixed cost on it most of the time.”
Hemet also saves money by centralizing planning and dispatch functions in its Hemet headquarters, where public calls are routed directly from outlying districts to clerks who answer the phone “Transportation” and use a computer database to match the student by name, school and possibly birthdate with the school bus and driver who picks them up.
Major bus repairs are done in Hemet, with satellite facilities in Perris, Bellflower and Industry. Drivers are screened and hired in Hemet, with eight fulltime trainers teaching more than two dozen recruits at a time.
School transportation budget problems in California date to the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978, a taxpayer revolt initiative that clamped down on property tax increases.
The state effectively froze its contributions for transporting students two years later, with cost-of-living adjustments, Fogerty said, after the California Supreme Court ruled that school bus transportation was not a student’s right unless that student was disabled or enrolled in specialeducation classes.
As school districts grappled with pared-down funding, especially in recent years, walking distances have been lengthened and some districts have eliminated all but special-education transportation.
“Every time there is a cut, they (the state) just say you must continue doing this. And then they short you the funding,” said Robert McEntire, chief business officer for the Garvey School District in Rosemead. “That happens throughout the education system. They say ‘You must do this and we may pay you.’ ”
Garvey, with 5,311 students in kindergarten through eighth grade, had been contracting with the Los Angeles County Office of Education to transport its special-education students. The county office then subcontracted with a private company to do the busing. The county added administrative fees to the private company’s charges.
Contracting with Hemet last year to transport Garvey’s 470 special-education students and for field trips cut the district’s transportation budget by 17 percent, McEntire said.
“For us, that would be about $150,000,” he said. “That is about 1 1/2 teachers for a small district like ours. That is significant.”
Hemet’s transportation empire has humble roots.
In the late 1990s, a consortium of the Hemet, San Jacinto, Beaumont and Banning school districts pooled resources to establish routes for transporting severely disabled students.
The system was in place in 2003, when Fogerty left the Beaumont school district to go to work in Hemet.
He said he noticed that California School for the Deaf in Riverside was paying what he considered a high price for students to be transported for weekly student housing.
By 2007, Hemet was transporting students both for CSDR and San Jacinto.
Word spread, Fogerty said, and within a year the Perris Union, Romoland, Nuview and Perris Elementary districts had joined.
The big explosion came three years ago when Hemet signed on as a vendor at the annual conference of the California Association of School Business Officials.
Financially pinched Los Angeles County school districts stampeded to ride Hemet buses.
Hemet school board members were buoyed at their Aug. 5 meeting by the latest addition of five Los Angeles-area school districts to the fold.
“We’d like to see something returned to the students,” Trustee Joe Wojcik said at the meeting. “Perhaps something we can do is shrink the … (walking distance) for all students.”
Elementary students living within 2 1/2 miles of school and secondary students within 5 miles of school are not bused, Fogerty said.
He said his staff will be calculating how much those walking distances can be shortened.
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FRANK BELLINO, STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
Dianne Pech, left, and Amber Johnson check the lights for driver JoAnne Santa Cruz before she leaves the Hemet school district’s bus yard.
DARRELL SANTSCHI
STAFF WRITER
FRANK BELLINO, STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
School bus drivers get their route assignments at Hemet Unified School District transportation headquarters. At a time when many California school districts are cutting or eliminating busing, Hemet’s service is growing.