State High Court Backs School Bus Fees : Education: The 6-1 ruling will allow transportation charges except for indigent or disabled students. It settles a dispute that began in Fillmore seven years ago.

Stepping into a legal controversy that started seven years ago in Fillmore, the California Supreme Court on Monday ruled that financially pressed public school districts may charge parents for busing their children to school.

The high court voted 6 to 1 to uphold a state law allowing transportation fees except for indigent or disabled students, rejecting a claim that such fees were unconstitutional.

Monday’s decision came as a victory for a group of 25 school districts that asked the high court to overturn a 1988 state appeal court ruling that struck down the bus fee law.

The 1988 ruling had stemmed from a lawsuit filed against state education officials by a Ventura County public-interest law firm in 1985 that challenged a busing fee adopted by the Fillmore Unified School District.

Although the Fillmore district triggered the lengthy case, the district dropped the fees in 1985 rather than defend its policy that the Ventura County counsel said would probably be declared unconstitutional, said Bob Kernen, the district’s business manager.

Yet Channel Counties Legal Services, the public-interest law firm, continued to press the lawsuit against the state educational officials who authorized school districts to impose a fee.

After Monday’s ruling, administrators with Ventura County school districts said it was too soon to tell whether they will impose busing fees. Yet several school administrators were pleased to have the option.

“The ruling is good news for us and to all districts who provide transportation and receive very little revenue for it,” said Carmela Vignocchi, business manager of the Moorpark Unified School District.

State subsidies pay for only $100,000 of the Moorpark district’s $600,000 busing costs, Vignocchi said. A budget advisory committee recommended that Moorpark administrators charge a fee last year, but the school board held off, she said. With the high court ruling, she said the issue will probably come before the board again this year.

Officials with the 18,000-student Simi Valley Unified School District--the largest in the county--also praised the decision. They said it could open the way for recovering $300,000 of the district’s $1.2 million in transportation costs not reimbursed by the state.

“Would $300,000 help? You’re doggone right it would,” said Ken Ashton, a member of the Simi Valley school board. “I’d much rather charge for busing students to school than to cut a program that helps kids.”

In September, a survey of Simi Valley parents showed qualified support for a busing fee, depending on the amount of the fee and the quality of the service, he said.

Other school administrators said their districts may consider busing fees now that the court has resolved some of the legal issues. But some said some complications remain.

Supt. Norman Brekke of the Oxnard Elementary School District said uncertainties about how exemptions from the fees will be defined will probably delay any consideration of a fee by the 12,000-student district.

“In our case, 80% of the students would be exempted if the income criteria is the same for the free-lunch program,” Brekke said. “That would probably require enormous amounts of record-keeping.”

While not required to do so, the vast majority of the state’s 1,021 school districts provide bus transportation. Only about 5% now impose fees that range from 50 cents to $1 per day.

In Monday’s majority opinion by Justice Edward A. Panelli, the high court rejected contentions by state officials and a group of parents that busing charges violated the state constitutional right to free schools and to equal protection of the law.

Unlike educational courses or extracurricular activities, busing to and from school is a “supplemental service” that is not covered by the free-school clause of the Constitution, the court said.

“Transportation is simply not an educational activity,” Panelli wrote. “Without doubt, school-provided transportation may enhance or be useful to school activity, but it is not a necessary element which each student must utilize or be denied the opportunity to receive an education,” the justice wrote.

The decision comes seven years after the Fillmore Unified School District set off the extended legal battle by adopting a 25-cent daily fee for each student riding the bus.

Officials in the 3,400-student district say they implemented the fee in January, 1984, to offset rising costs that threatened the district’s budget. “We were in a tight financial bind, and the cost of transportation was encroaching into our general funds,” said Bob Kernen, who manages the district’s finances.

“We felt we had a pretty good system going, and it was working quite well,” Kernen said. Children from poor families were eligible for exemptions, and parents could also buy season passes. “We didn’t feel it was imposing an unfair burden to any family.”

In the program’s first year, the district collected about $18,000 in fees, he said, covering more than half of the district’s annual $30,000 busing expense.

But some low-income parents objected to the fees and enlisted the support of the Channel Counties Legal Services Assn. in Oxnard.

“They were very upset with the fees,” said Robert K. Miller, the Channel Counties Legal Services attorney. “Many were low-income farm workers who lived a long distance from Fillmore, and had problems getting their children to school,” he said.

Miller said he will not appeal the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court because it does not have federal constitutional issues. But he said the court ruling gives parents latitude to challenge specific transportation-fee plans for the hardship that they might create. Some of these challenges are already working their way through the courts.

Miller criticized the inconsistency of the high court, which also has ruled that school officials cannot charge bus fees for students going to extracurricular events.

“The court has now said you cannot charge fees for football but you can for going to school on the bus,” Miller said.

Times legal affairs writer Philip Hager reported from San Francisco and Times correspondent Patrick McCartney reported from Ventura. Staff writer Carlos Lozano also contributed to this article.