Abstract
Washington State, like many other states, spends hundreds of millions of dollars annually to support the transportation of pupils to and from school. As with other state-funded activities, inefficiency increases costs and saps resources away from other critical state functions such as public and higher education, health care, transportation, and many others. In 2006, the state undertook a project to revise its pupil transportation funding formula and encourage its school districts to operate more efficiently. Together with Management Partnership Services, Inc., the state developed a DEA-based efficiency measurement system that it now uses to identify inefficient pupil transportation systems for management intervention. The system has identified potential first-year savings of roughly $33 million with recurrent annual savings of at least $13 million. The efficiency improvements could remove 312 school buses from the highways of Washington State.
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Notes
- 1.
There are 17 additional school districts and other educational units that do not provide pupil transportation.
Abbreviations
- AvgDist:
-
Average distance to school
- DEA:
-
Data Envelopment Analysis
- DMG:
-
David M. Griffith and Associates
- DMU:
-
Decision Making Unit
- INFORMS:
-
Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences
- Kroutes:
-
Number of mid-day kindergarten routes served
- NCDPI:
-
North Carolina Department of Public Instruction
- NoDest:
-
Number of destinations served
- Q1, …, Q4:
-
Binary indicator variables for the quartiles of total students transported
- RdMiles:
-
Number of highway miles (included for the calculation of RdMlesSqMile and StdtsRdMile)
- RdMlesSqMile:
-
Highway miles per square mile of land area
- RE:
-
Regular (basic) Education
- SE:
-
Special Education
- SpecEd:
-
Number of special program students transported per day
- STARS:
-
Student Transportation Allocation Reporting System
- STARS_PYE:
-
Annual operating expenditures
- StdtsRdMile:
-
Students transported per highway mile
- Students:
-
Combined number of Basic and Special Program students (included for the calculation of StdtsRdMile)
- TotalBasic:
-
Number of regular program students transported per day
- VBA:
-
Visual Basic for Applications©
References
Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, Office of the Actuary. (2012, January). http://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Statistics-Trends-and-Reports/NationalHealthExpendData/Downloads/Proj2011PDF.pdf. Accessed March 20, 2013.
School Bus Consultants, LLC. (2013, March 11). 9710 Traville Gateway Drive #363, Rockville, MD 20850, private communication.
Sexton, T. R., Sleeper, S., & Taggart, R. (1994). Improving pupil transportation in North Carolina. Interfaces, 24(1), 87–103.
World Health Organization. (2013). http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.TOTL.ZS. Accessed March 20, 2013.
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Appendix: Pupil Transportation Funding Approaches by Other States
Appendix: Pupil Transportation Funding Approaches by Other States
See Table 3
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Sexton, T.R., Jones, A.J., Forsyth, A., Lewis, H.F. (2014). Using DEA to Improve the Efficiency of Pupil Transportation. In: Emrouznejad, A., Cabanda, E. (eds) Managing Service Productivity. International Series in Operations Research & Management Science, vol 215. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-43437-6_19
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