Frustrated by the ballooning cost of busing students across the city, then-Mayor Thomas M. Menino declared a decade ago that “I will not allow us to pour dollar after dollar into gas tanks when we could invest more of that money into our classrooms.”
Yet since Menino uttered those words in his State of the City address in the Strand Theatre in 2008, school transportation spending in Boston escalated from about $76 million to $122.5 million last school year, even after officials overhauled the school assignment process to allow more students to attend classes closer to home.
Now a new set of city and school officials are raising questions about whether busing should be dramatically scaled back so more money can be spent on boosting school quality. The debate has gained momentum following a Northeastern University report last week that revealed many black and Latino students are not being assigned to high-quality schools.
But the cost savings might not be as plentiful as people think. Ferrying students under the school assignment system represented less than a third of transportation costs last year, ringing in at $37.2 million.