Public School District Options in Providing Transportation
School districts are provided with flexibility in how they can meet their obligation to provide transportation to eligible public and private school students. Most often, school boards will contract with a “common carrier” or company to meet the district’s transportation needs.
Among the other options available to a district are:
- Contracting with a taxi company to transport certain students;
- Transporting students in 9 or 10-person motor vehicles, most often vans either owned by the district or used under contract and;
- Offering a reimbursement contract to parents who in turn make arrangements for the transportation of their child.
It is option #3, the offering of parent contracts that is becoming more prevalent, and the source of some confusion.
Parent Contracts
There are only two circumstances where a public school district can offer the parent reimbursement contract to meet its obligation of providing transportation benefits to eligible private school students.
One of these options is on a voluntary basis. Parents offered a voluntary contract are under no obligation to accept. If the voluntary parent contract is rejected, the district must look to other means for meeting its obligation. The second option is mandatory and a little more complicated.
Wisconsin state statutes and administrative code allow for the use of mandatory parent contracts when the cost to transport the eligible private school student becomes “excessive.”
The threshold of “excessive” is reached when the estimated cost to the district to transport a given private school student is more than 150 percent of the district’s average cost per pupil for public school students in the previous year.
The amount of each mandatory parent contract will be the average per pupil cost for a given public school student or at least $5 times the distance in miles between the student’s home and school attended, whichever is greater, but may not exceed the actual cost of transportation. The contracts are paid on a per student basis, except in the Milwaukee Public School (MPS) district, where state statutes allow them to provide one contract per family for students attending the same school.
The public school district must verify the excessive cost of providing services to private school students and if it intends to offer the mandatory parent reimbursement contract, it must notify the parents of the affected student at least 30 days prior to the commencement of the public school term to which the contract would apply.
For more information on parent contracts see page 40 of the 2016-17 WCRIS Legal Handbook. WCRIS members can access the electronic version online here, with their log in information.
