Patrick gives back school bus money

By BEN STORROW Staff Writer

Published on January 01, 2010

Gov. Deval Patrick announced Monday that his administration would restore $18 million in regional school district transportation funding that had been cut from the state budget two months ago.

The news was widely applauded in Franklin and Hampshire counties, where school officials had been struggling to makeup for a midyear loss in transportation aid.

The decision is a reversal for the governor, who in October initiated a series of cuts intended to close the state's $600 million budget deficit. Yet in making those cuts, Patrick announced that education funding had been spared the budgetary ax, an assertion that drew the ire of regional school officials in the Pioneer Valley who rely on state aid to help bus students to school.

On Tuesday, Patrick administration officials said they decided to reverse course after listening to the pleas of local legislators and school officials.

"We had always seen it as a more operational item than an educational item, but districts made it very clear that they had obligations for funding some of their transportation contracts," Jonathan Palumbo, a spokesman for the Executive Office of Education, said in a phone interview Tuesday. "They had to find money from other parts of their budget to meet their obligations, which was forcing them to pull money from their education budgets. The governor found that to be unacceptable."

Jay Gonzalez, administration and finance secretary, will now work with Education Secretary Paul Reville to fully restore the $18 million, Palumbo said. The two will produce a plan in the coming weeks that will outline where the money will come from, he said.

In Franklin and Hampshire counties, news of the governor's decision was greeted with widespread enthusiasm.

Farshid Hajir, Amherst-Pelham Regional School Committee chairman, said his district will now better placed to deal with a difficult upcoming budget year, in which the school district could face a deficit of up to $2.6 million. The district would have lost $177,500 if the transportation cut had gone through.

"It's a big deal because for us it is $177,500 that we don't have to take to take out of our account for this year," Hajir said. "It's very welcome news in a pretty dire budget situation."

Up the road in Sunderland, Lynn Cook, a member of the Frontier Regional School Committee, said that her district was facing a $191,000 cut in transportation funding. She said the governor's decision was a welcome one.

"It's very good news," Cook said. "Obviously, we are looking at our budget for next year, and I haven't seen that yet, but this is obviously good news."

Across the Valley in Hampshire County, both Hampshire Regional and Gateway Regional school districts were also facing a cut in transportation funding. In a series of November interviews, Hampshire Superintendent Craig Jurgensen and Gateway Superintendent David Hopson said their districts stood to lose $377,000 and up to $230,000 respectively.

Yet even as the news of the announcement spread across the two counties Tuesday, questions remained about where the funding would come from.

State Rep. Stephen Kulik, D-Worthington, has helped spearhead the effort to restore regional transportation funding. He said that although he was pleased by the governor's decision, it remained unclear where the money would come from.

"We are waiting to see if he will use federal stimulus money or some other part of the budget," Kulik said Tuesday.

He noted he had met with Gonzalez a month ago, and at that time the finance secretary had said stimulus money was not an option.

"Now they are saying they are going to fund it, or they are going to find money somewhere else in the budget," Kulik said. "Either way, it is very good news for school districts in the middle of fiscal '10."

State Sen. Stanley Rosenberg, D-Amherst, made a similar point.

"I am very happy that the governor and the administration came to understand that this was going to have an effect on regional school districts only," Rosenberg said.

"This (decision) is going to help those communities and those students."

Back in Amherst, Hajir said he was especially pleased that the governor's office had come to recognize how the cuts were affecting regional school districts.

"The big story about the regional transportation cuts to me is that people's voices in rural western Massachusetts were heard in the governor's office," Hajir said.

Gazette contributing writer Mackenzie Issler contributed to this report.