One area of school budgeting that often confuses people is school transportation. One of the questions we hear quite often is how can a school get a new bus when they complain about how tight their budget is. And that is a good question. School budgets are made up of several different separate budget areas, and transportation is a budget area that sits by itself. Another that sits by itself is the bus depreciation budget. Both of those sit outside of the general fund, which is the fund we use to run our education program.
So how do the transportation and bus depreciation budgets get funded? Transportation is funded through a couple lines of revenue. One is the state. We receive money from the state for our bus routes. The other is through a permissive levy that is noted every March about an increase or decrease, and then the actual levy amount is posted in August. The bus depreciation budget is funded through a permissive levy and follows the same posting schedule. Each time we purchase a bus, we are permitted to depreciate it at 150% of value over an eight year period. That permits us to replace the buses in a timely fashion. Our goal is to provide our students with the safest transportation as we can.
This fall we will be replacing one of our buses with a new one. We will trade in a 2016 bus that has fully appreciated. The bus was ordered about a year and a half ago and should be here sometime this month. So if you see a new bus on a route soon, please remember that it does not impact the funds we use to educate the children in our district.