Student transportation funding

Transportation has its own allocation rather than being folded into the per-student basic education amount. The state's formula responds to ridership and distance, which is why two districts with identical enrollment can receive very different amounts.

Two exclusions matter for reading any transportation figure. Bus purchases are not in the general fund at all - they run through the separate Transportation Vehicle Fund. And the per-student figures below are per enrolled student, not per bus rider: most students never board a bus, so the real cost of carrying one student is far higher than these averages suggest.

Statewide that is $774 of general-fund transportation spending per enrolled student in 2024-25, against $783.0M allocated.

Transportation is the least uniform of the three published gaps: 177 of 315 districts spent above their allocation, meaning a substantial minority spent less than the formula provided. Geography, not policy, explains most of that split.

Ranked by per-student difference. Small rural districts dominate: long routes over sparse territory cost roughly the same to run whether twenty students or two hundred ride them.

Among districts with more than 10,000 funded students:

The spending side is F-196 program 99, general fund only. Because bus purchases sit outside the general fund, this figure understates the full cost of running student transportation - it describes operations, not fleet replacement.

This site does not attempt to reproduce the state's STARS allocation model, which computes an expected cost from ridership and distance. The comparison here is between what a district received and what it spent, which is a narrower question than whether the formula is correctly calibrated.

Relevant bills: ESSB 5009 (vehicle types), SB 5858 (a safety net for transporting students with disabilities and students experiencing homelessness or in foster care), and ESSB 6260 (bus depreciation). See Take Action and Sources & Methodology.