On a week where local school buses were mostly idled by unusually heavy snowfall for November, R-2 administrators and directors were informed their best option to obtain more transportation reimbursement may be to sue the state.

Gasconade County R-2 School District students missed classes entirely on Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday last week and were dismissed early on Monday, Nov. 12. That day counted as a complete day with attendance until 12:30 p.m.

As of today, the school’s 2018-19 calendar has been extended until May 16. Making up for missed days last week means students will now be in session on previously scheduled days off in 2019 including Monday, Jan. 21 (MLK Day), Monday, Feb. 18 (President’s Day), and Thursday, May 16 (originally a teacher workday). May 15 was originally scheduled as the final day of classes.

The district will add any additional missed days onto the calendar starting with Friday, May 17, and continuing the next week from Monday,May 20, through Friday, May 20, if needed. Only Thursday, March 14, remains as a built-in snow day, which could be used to make up the seventh miss of the required seven days to make up. After seven misses, schools may count one day for two up to the 10th missed day. After 10 missed days, a district’s board of education may allow any additional misses to be forgiven. 

Molly Steinbeck, a director on the local board of education asked Monday night why snow routes have never been implemented. Superintendent Dr. Chuck Garner said he has been asked that same question by others and they do run snow routes informally.

“We will call some families and say, ‘we can’t make it to your house. You need to bring them to this intersection or to this place,” Garner said. “But to say we are not going to go down this road, or down this road, or down there — once we started drawing that out, then we might as well cancel school.”

Garner explained that in the rural routes, many of the roads are so long, that even though there is no issue two-thirds of the way down, the bus turnaround is at the end.

“Once you get to the end of that road becomes the issue,” he said. “If we say we are not going to go down that road at all, that is several miles.”

Steinbeck said she has heard that Route EE was the deciding paved road for whether the district would have school. Which county roads did the district look at?

Garner said that wasn’t correct. The district sends out two people to check the roads.

“I go out and I go south and Gary (Pohlmann, transportation director) goes north,” Garner said. “We look at several of our tricky spots that we know are issues. We go to those spots specifically, looking at the county roads.”

Garner said his route goes from Owensville all the way down to Route F. 

“Then I am hitting Bem Church Road and Hog Trough Road, and Hecker and Farris Roads. Uncle Sam Road that comes out on Route Y. Then I go out to Peaceful Valley and come back this way. I am hitting this area,” Garner said. “Gary goes out to Route ZZ and up to Stoney Hill, Gerald, Rosebud and that area.”

Ridership for the 2018-19 school year so far is 1,349 students or 72 percent of the student population. That is up one percent from last year.

“We transport approximately 2,200 miles a day in routes,” Garner said. “That does not include side trips or athletics. We are a big district as far as miles.”

Most of those miles are rural. Garner said he has been in the ditch twice.

“One time I was talking to Gary on the phone, and said, ‘you may have to come get me.’ He said ‘why’  and I said, ‘because I am sliding backwards.’”

Funding inequality in rural areas

A lack of snow routes isn’t the only transportation issue caused by the size of the district. Garner said the district is supposed to receive 75 percent reimbursement from the 2,200 miles it cover daily.

“State statutes says we are supposed to get 75 percent of our reimbursable miles,” Garner said. “We are currently at 27 percent. Which figures out for our district to be approximately $445,000.”

Garner said that is $445,000 less the district could spend on other things like classrooms. The only recourse is to sue the state.

“It affects us more so than smaller schools,” Garner said. “For example, Brentwood School District is three square miles. So from what Molly was saying, they have no transportation. They have buses for athletic trips. So why would they vote to increase transportation? They would rather fund something else because it is not important to them.”

The state is not required to reimburse transportation funds for students who live within 3.5 miles of campus.

“Rep. Tom Hurst could vote to fund transportation completely, but then there are two or three representatives that service Brentwood, because they have such a micro population, that all vote no,” Garner said. “We are impacted way more than other schools.”

The R-2 district is the 17th largest land-area school district in the state and Gasconade County R-1 in Hermann is the 15th largest in square miles.

Challenging roads

Garner said what people don’t understand when they are going down the road, going isn’t the problem. 

“When we start up a hill and have a house we have to stop on that hill,” he said. “Then we stop, now we can’t get started again.”

Both he and Pohlmann will visit the problem areas, start, and try to stop again. “If we can’t go or have to put it in four-wheel drive, that’s a problem because the bus doesn’t have four-wheel drive,” Garner said.

Gerald Elementary Principal Jennifer Hall said there have been incidences of buses stuck on hills.

“Diane Schultz sat for 25 minutes on a hill. She was out on that road you were talking about, with her feet on the brakes, and every time she started to put on the gas, she started sliding backwards. She sat until someone could get to her,” Hall said.

Garner said some other places people don’t think about is bus turnarounds.

“There is places at the end of the road that are bus turnarounds and they are all tree covered and tree lined. So the sun never gets to those, but our bus gets to those and has to turnaround, but can’t get turned around,” he said.

“My concern is we have another snow like Thursday and we don’t get another warm day like we had. That’s never going to — we could miss school for two weeks over that,” Steinbeck said.

Board President Glenn Ely said the county road department will get to those places outside of town.

“So what we did on that Tuesday, we let out of school on Monday, so that Tuesday afternoon, our transportation people took pick-ups with cinders out to the turnarounds,” Ely noted.

Garner said Pohlmann talks to the road departments all the time, but there are times he cinders roads that they didn’t. “We do it ourselves,” Garner said. “We will stop the truck and shovel them out, or go to the turnarounds and try to do something.”

“So we don’t have snow routes, because, basically, too many county roads?” Steinbeck asked.

“Too many. If we were just running pavement, holy cow,” said Garner.

“My kids are taking the garden hose and wetting the drive way down,” Ely joked.

“I was going to buy Walmart out of salt,” Steinbeck said.

Garner said the issue for him is, he has had buses stuck on hills before. “Over by Dead Man’s Hill (Buchholz Hollow Road), we had a bus stuck there and I was living in town. I went to my furnace and got all of my cinders and filled up the back of my truck. We walked kids to the top of the hill and got the bus out. It happens and I don’t like it happening because that means a decision wasn’t made soon enough or we missed something.

“There was one time a few years ago that it started misting rain and then there was a thin sheet of ice everywhere. Then the decision becomes, do we hold them and wait for the county people to get out and try to get some stuff? Sometimes letting them out at one o’clock is not good enough.

“I would rather error on the side of having the kids stay home an extra day, and they are safe, than having buses in the ditch.”

Steinbeck asked if there were any issues releasing them early on Monday.

“Yeah, we called some parents because they couldn’t make it up the hill,” said Garner. “But the bulk of the buses did fine. Drivers were smart that when they would try to get up the hill and start sliding, they would say, ‘ooh, I have to get up there,’ and back down. On two occasions, the parents did not have a problem coming to get them.”