Polk County School Board members voted Monday, March 12 to approve a lease contract for five yellow buses, even though the state will actually be the governing body paying the lease payments for the buses until they are paid off in four years.
The North Carolina legislature allotted no money last budget year to purchase new buses outright, though most school systems need to retire buses on a yearly basis and rely on funding from the state to purchase new ones.
“Boiling it all down, it amounts to the state being able to buy buses like it used to when it had funds appropriated through the general assembly and only having to pay for them in full over the course of four years,” said Polk County Superintendent Bill Miller.
Miller said this scenario is better than what had been proposed, which was to move the responsibility of purchasing buses for school systems from the state to counties.
What it also means though is that every school system or LEA (Local Education Agency) would have to sign a contract as if they were buying the buses themselves, but rely on the state to make the lease payment every year.
Miller said the rules say that if the state doesn’t allot the money promised, the school systems won’t be responsible for the bill. What could happen, Miller said, is that the company from which the buses will be purchased  could pick those buses back up, if the state doesn’t send in the financing.
“In our case we’re going to get five buses and that’s a big deal to us because that’s a third of our buses,” Miller said. “I don’t think we’re in a position to turn down five buses, especially when they are $80,000 a piece. If you think about it, I don’t think the state is going to risk the embarrassment of having buses repossessed all across the state.”
Miller said this plan however only catches the state up on the needed buses for last year and this year. It doesn’t solve the problem of replacing buses that will need to be cycled out next year.
“Buses are on a continual cycle – buying them never goes away,” he said. “I don’t see how this is going to be a good thing long-term, but we’ve got to have buses.”