Trego's Mountain Ear

Last week, we asked the question: Is it normal for school district transportation budgets to be constant from year to year? Looking again at the school budgets (public information- available for download here), we’ll check Trego’s transportation budget against Fortine and Olney-Bissell.

	Trego	Fortine	Olney-Bissell
24/25	$40,000	$100,000	$212,343.85
23/24	$49,000	$110,000	$182,153.42
22/23	$49,000	$100,000	$178,610.31
21/22	$49,000	$79,000	$148,389.48
20/21	$49,000	$79,000	$142,509.61
19/20	$39,600	$79,000	$136,007.52
18/19	$56,500	$77,000	$128,707.28
17/18	$54,000	$77,000	$132,116.37
16/17	$48,925	$77,000	$123,648.45
15/16	$48,925	$79,000	$121,413.44

Looking through the numbers- my first response is: That’s really weird. Olney-Bissell shows a steady increase over the last decade. Inflation being a thing that exists, that makes sense. Trego and Fortine fluctuate, but not a whole lot. For those of us that like graphs:

There are really two factors to be considered in the costs associated with transportation: Mileage, and time (paying the bus drivers). Both of these are going to be related to number of students and district size.

We can absolutely get an approximate number of students- from the same file, even. It’ll be an approximate (ANB funding will usually be based on the three year average, though it might also be the current year, depending on changes in enrollment). The mileage, well, that’s going to be more interesting to find.

For the moment, we can observe that a recent increase in Fortine’s transportation budget seems to coincide with lowered enrollment.

Meanwhile, the transportation budget in Trego doesn’t seem to have been connected to enrollment at all.