After hearing complaints about students riding in buses without air conditioning during hot weather, the Cobb County School District got the message.
On Thursday, the Cobb Board of Education approved the purchase of nine new buses, all of them with air conditioning, as the 112,000-student district begins transforming its bus fleet over the next few years.
The 7-0 vote comes a month after the board voted to table the measure.
The nine new buses will cost a total of $895,758, with $538,576 coming from the current Cobb Education V SPLOST (Special-Purpose Local Option Sales Tax), and the rest from state bus bonds and a district building fund.
Five of the buses with have 72-seat capacities for regular education students, and the other four will accommodate 48 special-education students each.
Marc Smith, the school district’s chief technology and operations officer, said Cobb schools have a fleet of 1,198 buses, but only 195 have air conditioning.
During a Thursday afternoon work session, he laid out a purchasing option that would call for a total of 212 new air-conditioned buses through 2023. The costs would include $21 million in SPLOST funds (see chart below).
During the presentation, Cobb school superintendent Chris Ragsdale said the better option for the district was to buy air-conditioned buses, rather than having current buses retrofitted.
He also apologized for presenting inaccurate data at the October board meeting. Of the 279 special-education buses, 81 have air conditioning. The general-education fleet of 831 buses has five that are air-conditioned.
Of the new air-conditioned buses that will be purchased with current SPLOST funding, 123 will be for general education students and 89 will be for special education students.
Having air conditioning adds about $10,000 to the cost of a new bus. Board members haggled in October about that expense, with first-year board member Jaha Howard lobbying for air conditioning.
David Banks of Post 5 in East Cobb argued against it, saying the heat experienced by students early in the school year doesn’t bother them.
At the start of the work session, Jon Gargis, the father of a Cobb student, noted concerns about the cost of air-conditioned buses, given that the board was set to consider Thursday night an eminent domain resolution to buy 15 acres of land near Walton High School for $3 million for a softball field and tennis courts (The board later agreed to terms with the property owner for the purchase, avoiding eminent domain.).
“I’m not a mathematician,” said Gargis, a former reporter for The Marietta Daily Journal, but he calculated that adding that $3 million could help buy 300 72-seat buses to serve more than 21,000 students, about a fifth of the district’s total enrollment.
“I hope that if we can find the money for athletics, we can find the funding for climate-control systems which are all but a necessity and an expected amenity to all of us in 2019,” he said.
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Have you been on a school bus in full sun? It’s hot, very hot. Why would anyone say no to giving students a comfortable ride home?