A school district was wrong to require a charter school to provide county-wide bus service, an administrative law judge ruled this week.
In competing legal actions, the St. Lucie County school district had argued the Renaissance Charter School at Tradition needed to provide busing to students who lived more than two miles away to comply with a local policy. The district contended the lack of busing was a barrier to equal access for students.
The charter school countered the district did not have the legal authority to impose such a requirement, noting among other things that the cost of busing would strain its budget, and that the district did not provide county-wide busing to all of its own students.
In an order issued this week, administrative law judge Darren Schwartz agreed the district’s busing requirement overstepped its legal authority.
The law says a lack of transportation cannot be a barrier to charter school access, but it gives charters flexibility to decide how to provide it. It specifically says schools can work with “parents” to help arrange transportation, which is what the charter school at Tradition did.
The lack of bus service, Schwartz wrote in his order, “does not constitute a barrier to equal access to all students.” A busing requirement, he added, “would violate one of the fundamental principles of the charter school statute, which is to provide charter schools greater flexibility.”
The Legislature specifically recognized that charter schools should have greater flexibility than traditional public schools. Parents choose to send their children to charter schools, knowing full-well that they may reside more than two miles from the charter school, and that their traditional public school may be located much closer to their residence than the charter school.
Transportation remains an issue for some charter schools, which receive less funding per student than district schools and often lack the economies of scale to provide cost-effective bus service. This week, for example, a Naples Daily News article suggested it might be a factor in one high-performing Southwest Florida school’s struggle to attract a diverse student population.
