By Hannah Soyer

In January, the Iowa City School Board eliminated free busing for many Iowa City school students. The School Board has recently approved a pay-to-ride system that will begin next school year in which families will have to pay $518 per year if they wish for their students to have seats on the buses. For students who are eligible for a free or reduced-price lunch, the annual fee is $310. This option is being reinstated for the families who live on the routes in which busing has been cut, routes that went through areas that were deemed to have traffic or safety concerns. 

For students who live 2 to 3 miles away from their schools, busing is required by Iowa law. Families who live closer than this to the school or live in an area deemed unsafe or having traffic concerns lost their busing in January, but they now have the option to pay for a seat on the bus. Some areas, which were identified as having transportation barriers by the School Board, will still receive free busing. 

However, this new policy implicitly favors wealthier families, and class differences among students will undoubtedly become more apparent than they already are. It should not be assumed that parents or siblings of students are able to transport a student to school by way of car. If parents have to work, this easily interferes with their ability to transport their children because of potentially conflicting schedules. And if the child has a sibling, this sibling may attend a school that has a different starting time, or has a before or after school activity, or may not have a car to begin with. Every person of school age should have unrestricted access to a free education, and in some ways, this new policy has infringed on that. 

On top of this, although it is unclear what the School Board means by areas that are unsafe or have traffic concerns, it seems as if these areas would be specific places in which the students living there would have difficulty getting to school on their own. It seems rather counterintuitive to eliminate busing from such areas. 

The School Board has stated that the decision to cut free busing was a result of the School District being underfunded by the state and thus not being able to justify the costs that free busing for every student entails. In a statement made to the Iowa City Press-Citizen, School Board President Chris Lynch said that the eliminated busing costs could be used to hire more classroom teachers. This, I believe everyone can agree with me, is a good thing. 

However, it may have been a better decision to cut the busing more gradually and perhaps only for families that lived a mile or less away from the school, a mile being a fair amount for a student to walk in all seasons. Cutting unnecessary busing is something that absolutely should be done, as should be redistributing these funds. But the busing the Iowa City School Board has eliminated does not fit these terms, and should therefore be rethought.