Santa Clarita / Antelope Valley : School District Weighs Busing Fee for Students : Sulphur Springs: Officials say a $100 charge and related savings would halve a deficit of nearly $300,000. A public hearing is scheduled July 28.

A third district is considering a fee to bus students to school this fall to partly offset a nearly $300,000 deficit for transportation services.

The Sulphur Springs Union School District proposal would charge students $100 per year. Families would pay $75 per year to bus a second child and $50 for a third.

“I believe the board is very serious about adopting this. We have a quarter-million-dollar-plus deficit in our transportation budget,” Sulphur Springs Supt. Robert Nolet said.

The school board is scheduled to conduct a public hearing on the proposal July 28 and vote Aug. 18.

The district buses 1,700 students on an average day and up to 2,500 students on a busy day, Nolet said.

For parents with children attending more than one Santa Clarita school district, busing fees can amount to hundreds of dollars per year.

The Newhall School District and the William S. Hart Union High School District began charging students $200 a year to ride the bus last fall--a move that resulted in many students abandoning the school bus in favor of public transportation, officials said.

Sulphur Springs officials expect paying ridership of 1,000 students if the fee is approved, generating $100,000 for the district. Together with savings accrued by serving fewer students and taking buses out of service, Nolet said the district’s transportation deficit should be cut at least by half.

“It has been a rare year we haven’t had deficit spending,” Nolet said. “The state of California basically does not recognize home-to-school transportation as an area they’ve wanted to fund for a long time.”

The exception is for disabled students, who are bused for free, with a portion of the cost reimbursed by the state. Disabled students would still be able to ride the bus for free under the plan proposed in Sulphur Springs, as they do in the Newhall and Hart districts.

The Sulphur Springs’ busing fee would take effect in October. School officials hope to better prepare parents for the charge by not assessing it at the beginning of the school year.

“We absolutely need to impose the fees, but we don’t want them to impact any more than need be,” Nolet said.

After teen-age patrons in the Hart district switched to public transit, public bus ridership jumped 35% in September and October from the same period in 1991, from 2,000 to 2,700 daily riders, said Ron Kilcoyne, city transportation manager.

Santa Clarita’s weekday bus service, managed by ATE Management & Service Co. of Long Beach, includes local routes that now serve 3,600 riders per day, commuter runs to downtown Los Angeles for about 500 riders, and a door-to-door van service for 200 residents, mostly senior citizens and the disabled.

“The jump in ridership we got was from high school and the junior high schools. I would not anticipate a big jump in ridership from Sulphur Springs,” Kilcoyne said.

However, last year’s switch was not without problems. Officials blame youths for rowdiness, graffiti, foul language and theft on city buses and at the Santa Clarita Transit Center in Saugus.

Santa Clarita officials began periodically riding the buses in June at the direction of City Manager George Caravalho.

Buses were described as clean and drivers were praised as courteous, but there was concern about graffiti and scratches on the inside of the vehicles, Kilcoyne said.