Got bus? Transportation is a big issue for Utah's charter schools

For instance, in Delaware, students are transported to charter schools on either district buses or charter school buses. If the charter schools provide the buses, they get state transportation aid.

"Charter schools are accused often of white flight and of not meeting the needs of people in lower socioeconomic (status)," said Kim Frank, executive director of the Utah Association of Public Charter Schools. "Our argument to that is that most of the people who can drive their kids to and from school are people who are in higher socioeconomic ranges. If the Legislature would like us to appeal to the others, we would love that. It would require transportation funding."

But Frank isn't going to ask the Legislature for transportation funding any time soon.

When lawmakers in 1998 passed the law for the creation of charter schools, "we agreed charter schools wouldn't come after transportation funding," Frank said. "That's a huge expenditure to the state.

"It is not a legislative priority," she said.

"Districts are not even funded 100 percent of transportation right now," said Marlies Burns, director of charter schools at the Utah State Office of Education. "I think it would be too costly in the near future. There's always that hope we could get transportation funding."

But Vik Arnold, director of government relations for the Utah Education Association, wondered whether taxpayers would be ready to pay for charter school buses.

"We never took an official position on it," Arnold said about the state's largest teachers union. "I think it's fair to say when the traditional public schools that have 95 percent of all the students in Utah are funded at the lowest level on a per-pupil basis of any state in the country, it's really difficult to support additional funding for transportation for those attending charter schools."

With more than 20,000 students now in charter schools in Utah, most parents will have to continue to make do with car pools.

That's not the case, though, for those who attend the Academy for Math, Engineering and Science, a charter school located at Cottonwood High in Salt Lake City.

"I have six routes that go across the Salt Lake area," Principal Al Church said. "I wouldn't have a diverse student population without this bus system for our students."

Forty-three percent of AMES students qualify for free and reduced-price lunch because their parents have low incomes.

Students at AMES and a handful of other charter schools along the Wasatch Front have bus passes — some of them are provided by the schools and some of the schools require parents to purchase them unless they qualify for fee waivers.

But the comprehensive transportation at AMES isn't cheap.