Bus Service for Palos Verdes Students Not Yet a Sure Thing

With only four weeks to go until the start of fall classes, Palos Verdes school officials say they are still uncertain whether home-to-school bus service will be available for students.

Mark IV Charter Lines, a Gardena-based company, is studying whether to offer the service, which parents must pay for themselves. The company that had previously run the service, Laidlaw Transit, notified the district in June that it would no longer do so.

“We need to make it make economic sense to us,” Mark IV President Jay Mannino said in an interview. “We are not absolutely certain of the ridership.”

Mannino, whose company recently signed a contract with the school district to provide bus service for students participating in extracurricular activities, said his company could arrive at a decision by next week.

The decision will be based in part on the results of a survey the district mailed to 5,200 families last week asking if they wanted bus service for their children. So far, 570 families representing 682 children have responded that they either needed or would be interested in the service, according to Nancy Mahr, spokeswoman for the Palos Verdes Peninsula Unified School District.

Mannino said there is “no magic number” of students needed before the company would be willing to provide the service. Other factors, including the type of buses needed and the routes that would have to be run, must also be determined, he said.

A Laidlaw official said 400 students signed up last year for bus transportation. Each student was charged $350.

The district halted bus service to students in the mid-’60s after residents voted down a ballot measure that would have increased taxes to pay for it, according to Mahr. Under state law, the district is not required to provide the service.

Since that time, a number of private companies have provided the service. Although only a small percentage of the district’s 9,000 students have relied on the service, some who do could face a serious hardship if it is no longer offered.

“It would be hardest on families where mothers work, or on single mothers,” Palos Verdes Estates Mayor Ruth Gralow said.

Laidlaw provided the bus service for three years. Joseph Jones, the company’s district director of operations, said in a letter to school officials that Laidlaw was terminating the service because it was reorganizing its management staff and downsizing its bus fleet to improve operations in Southern California.

In an interview, Jones said that until last year, the company also held a contract to provide bus service for the Southern California Regional Occupational Center in Torrance. When the company lost that contract, providing bus service to schoolchildren in the nearby Palos Verdes district was no longer attractive to the company, he said.

“Economically, it was not paying,” Jones said.