An Analysis of Special Needs Student Busing

Population growth can lead to public school capacity issues as well as increased school bus utilization, which, in turn, can result in longer school bus transport times for regular and special needs students. Special needs or medically fragile students are children with special health care needs who are at increased health and safety risk. It is common practice to provide special needs students with specially-equipped buses and/or special classroom environments with specific facilities or services. However, the assignment of student services to schools is regularly made without regard to bus transportation considerations for special needs students. Considering the potentially negative impact of long school bus rides on these students, we present the first systematic, integrated analyses of special needs student busing and classroom assignments. We provide models and algorithms for maintaining administration-based transportation financial performance measures while simultaneously designing smarter transportation networks considering both student geographical location and service needs. Introduction As urban areas grow in population, some people choose to relocate to the suburbs, often for “more space”—to be more spread out across suburban neighborhood areas. One of the main public services that is impacted by these city-to-suburb moves is rural public education systems. When a school district grows both in Journal of Public Transportation, Vol. 16, No. 1, 2013 22 terms of its number of schools and its geographic area, school capacity limitations and student bus transportation can become important challenges. Ineffectively making student-to-school assignments and/or inefficient bus routing plans can result in longer school bus rides for students. The magnitude of these inefficiencies is further magnified when one considers the transportation of special needs students. According to McPherson et al. (1998), special needs or medically fragile students are “children with special health care needs who have or are at increased risk for a chronic physical, developmental, behavioral, or emotional condition and who also require health and related services of a type or amount beyond that required by children generally.” Given this characterization, it follows that longer school bus rides caused by the planning inefficiencies described above can adversely impact special needs students. Special needs students typically require special buses and/or special classroom environments with specific facilities or services. Based on the severity of their needs, special needs students are placed into a class containing a specific teacherto-student ratio, such as a 1:6 class containing a maximum of 6 students and 1 teacher. Additionally, 1:10 and 1:15 classrooms are typically found in practice. Students in the latter classroom type typically have less or fewer needs for services. In terms of busing, not all buses in a school district can be used for special needs student transport since they require special facilities. In terms of service needs, the special services required are not offered in all schools in a school district—often, they are offered in less than one half of the district’s schools. These special services do not necessarily refer to lifts and physical equipment; they could refer to a trained teacher for special needs students, for example. It follows that these limited busing and services options can result in one or more special needs students being assigned to a school that is not necessarily close to his/her home, resulting in longer bus transportation times. Interviews with school district officials suggest that current practice is for school administrators to assign special needs services to district schools based on either experience and/or requests from a principal, often with little or no consideration of where the special needs students reside. In one extreme case, the authors learned about a special needs student who rides her bus two hours each way to and from school every day. Since the assignment process is somewhat subjective and currently is not supported by any type of analytical models in the school districts we investigated, it is quite possible that model-supported assignment decisions can