The Buses: Trying to Keep Up

The South County housing boom has been a transportation bust for the Saddleback Unified School District, where bus-route planners can’t make maps fast enough to keep pace with development.

“I lie awake at night worrying about it,” said Wayne Dailing, contract manager for Mayflower Contract Services, which holds the district’s bus contract. “There are so many new homes opening up that I won’t have ridership counts until the start of school.”

The tremendous housing growth, which has added 700 to 1,000 new students--enough to fill an elementary school--to the district’s enrollment in each of the last four years, has been accompanied by some new financial constraints, according to district business manager Bill Manahan.

The district owns a fleet of 60 buses and vans and pays $2 million annually to operate the transport network. The state reimburses $1 million of that, and parents contributed a total of $600,000 until last year, when the state Department of Education ordered districts to stop charging for bus service.

“We’re dealing with more students and, at the same time, redesigning bus routes to increase the maximum walking distance,” Manahan said.

An estimated 5,000 pupils, most of them in the elementary grades, will be bused this year, compared to 10,000 eligible for bus rides last year. The district, which serves 24,000 youngsters from kindergarten through high school, includes the county’s biggest growth areas--Rancho Santa Margarita, Mission Viejo, Lake Forest, Laguna Hills and El Toro.