KAILUA-KONA — Summer break is here, and with it comes a reprieve from intense traffic for daily commuters. ADVERTISING KAILUA-KONA — Summer break is here, and with it comes a reprieve from intense traffic for daily commuters. But motorists’ break
KAILUA-KONA — Summer break is here, and with it comes a reprieve from intense traffic for daily commuters.
But motorists’ break between bumpers, like students’ freedom from first period, will be short lived — seemingly over before it’s begun. It won’t be long before Ray Pierra, who lives more than 5 miles up Palani Road, sees the gridlock return.
“Every morning when school is in session, traffic is backed up from Kealakehe High School past the Palisades and up to Kaiminani Drive,” said Pierra. “When school isn’t in session, traffic backs up to maybe Kaloko Drive — about 2 miles less than normal during school season.”
Candace Kow is mother to a son who grew up in the Kealakehe school system and occasionally drives a school bus for the county. She said traffic in and around Kealakehe High School is manageable, but traffic around the elementary school can frequently come to a stand still because it’s situated in a residential neighborhood.
Regardless of access in their immediate areas, each school in the system is a culprit when it comes congestion on Palani Road, she said.
“Traffic on the highway is people going to the elementary, intermediate and the high schools who live on the upper road on the mountainside,” Kow said. “It’s bumper to bumper, but you are moving still. You need 10 to 15 minutes to get through that.”
The simplest way to combat the congestion is to pack more students on school buses, as four-lane roads aren’t likely to cris-cross West Hawaii any time soon. But stops on the mountain don’t generate the same type of bus ridership as do stops downtown.
“If you go downtown, one stop fills up the whole bus,” she said. “If you go all the way up mauka, it’s maybe half, but it really depends.”
Kow added that ridership is heavier and more regular in the mornings, while extra-curricular activities cause variations in the afternoon. But scheduling and preference aren’t the only variables affecting which students make use of school buses and when.
Hawaii was one of 13 states in the nation to allow districts to charge fees for public school bus service and the only state to mandate those fees for all districts as of 2011, according to a report published by Florida’s Office of Program Policy Analysis and Government Accountability.
Annual round-trip bus service per student on Hawaii Island costs $270 per year, while annual one-way service runs $135. Quarterly round-trip service costs parents or guardians $72 and quarterly one-way service totals $36, said Hawaii Department of Education spokesperson Brent Suyama.
Charging in some form or fashion for access to school buses in Hawaii is a practice Suyama said stretches back to the 1970s.
“I think it’s ridiculous to pay for a school bus,” said Tierra Knight, a mother of three children soon to enter the public school system in West Hawaii. “If my kids don’t qualify for free rides, then I won’t let them ride the bus.”
Nearly 38 percent, or 9,417 of Hawaii Island’s 24,964 students, hold bus passes for the 2016-17 school year. Regular education students make up the vast majority of bus riders, and 6,817 of them will ride for free while 1,917 will pay, according to numbers provided by department. There are also 683 special needs students utilizing bus service, all of whom will ride for free.
Students are eligible for free bus service if they are homeless, foster children, qualify for free lunch programs, have special education needs, are directed by the district to attend a school outside their designated attendance zone or have three older siblings who pay bus fares.
Angee Lincoln-Smith is a mother of three and has two children who ride the bus. Neither qualify for free rides, so the yearly cost to her household totals $540. Soon, it will be $810.
“(My husband and I) are two hardworking parents really trying to get ahead,” Lincoln-Smith said. “Our students should have free education and free transportation. I want to understand why we are left behind while the mainland has better opportunities?”
The answer is money — plain and simple.
“Although student fare collections make up only a small portion of the total annual cost of transportation services, the legislature would have to increase the annual transportation budget by roughly $2 million to make bus service free for all Hawaii Island students,” said Suyama.
The department’s Hawaii County transportation budget was $15.3 million as of the end of the 2015-16 school year.
If the state didn’t charge some students, it couldn’t supplement the allocated budget substantially enough to serve every student’s needs, Suyama said. Children with special needs represent a significant portion of overall transportation costs, as some require door-to-door service among other accommodations.
He added that although the county has a “spattering of unused capacity,” even if every student on the Big Island wanted to ride the bus, county resources couldn’t come close to servicing the demand.
“The specific number of additional students we can accommodate using existing resources is unknown,” Suyama said. “(But) it’s nowhere near enough to support 100 percent of Hawaii Island’s student population.”
One way the state has tried to limit costs for the service it can provide is by contracting out to local companies. The process was streamlined in 2012, shifting from a pay-per-route system to a pay-per-time system, which Suyama said helps promote several bidders for each contract and ultimately drives costs down.
But Lincoln-Smith said the financial hit for paying families is still substantial. It’s particularly noticeable after breaks at Christmas and in the spring, when extra childcare costs are followed immediately by bus fares coming due.
The progress her family has made to steadily improve their economic situation in recent years is substantially negated by disqualifications from free bus rides and lunch programs, which in her view, is almost a quasi-punishment for increased financial stability.
The school bus system — mired in issues of its own — appears insufficient to significantly impact daily traffic in West Hawaii. And thus, daily commuters should expect to become reacquainted with the bumper stickers on the vehicles in front of them when classes resume this fall.
