Free Ride Is Over for Corona-Norco Students

Most students who ride the bus to school in the Corona-Norco Unified School District will pay between $80 and $100 a year beginning in September, school officials announced this week.

The district’s first fees for bus riders are lower than nearly all of those now collected for school busing by a handful of other school districts in Riverside and Orange counties.

The Corona-Norco school board voted last November to levy the fees, citing an increasing drain on the budget by transportation costs. Parents who faced paying for the previously free service voiced strong opposition to the plan.

The formula adopted by the board limits transportation expenditures to 1% of the projected budget, with the remaining costs covered by state money and the new fees.

In the coming school year, the state will provide $1.2 million for transportation, the district $500,000 and the parents of bus riders $350,000, according to estimates prepared by Robert W. Crank, assistant superintendent for business services.

Parents will be required to pay for only two students at a time, Crank said, while others in the family will ride for free. About 200 special-education students will continue getting free rides to school, as will about 800 students from needy families, who qualify for free or reduced-price school lunches.

About 4,800 students ride the district’s buses each day, he said.

An annual bus pass will cost $90, but riders will get a $10 discount for buying their passes at least three weeks before school starts.

Semester passes will cost $50, with a $5 discount for early purchase, Crank said.

State Department of Education figures from the 1984-85 school year, the most recent statewide figures available, showed that 55 of California’s 1,029 school districts charge bus fees.

In Riverside County, only one of 24 school districts, Riverside Unified, charged a fee in the last school year.

Six of Orange County’s 28 school districts levy bus fees ranging from $75 to $135 annually, for the first student in a family. One of the six, Capistrano Unified School District, is returning to free busing in September, said Ed Rooney, the district’s transportation manager.

When the Corona-Norco fee schedule was presented Wednesday night to the board, members Charles Carter and Louis VanderMolen noted that a proposal they supported last month would have saved nearly as much money as the fees will raise.

The pair voted April 22 to replace the district’s transportation department with a private contractor. But the majority of the five-member board voted to continue operating the district’s own fleet of buses for at least another year.

Most board members were swayed by bus drivers’ cost-cutting proposals and their offer “to make many sacrifices and cuts,” they said.

To help offset a drop in ridership, typically experienced by school districts when they impose bus fees, the Corona-Norco district will open bus routes to some elementary school students who live too close to their schools to be eligible for rides, Crank said.