Gas prices bust school bus budget

With gas prices skyrocketing across the country, the fuel budget for Lumpkin County Schools is taking a major hit.
At Lumpkin County School System’s Work Session on Wednesday, March 9, superintendent Dr. Rob Brown said that the school system is on pace to spend $67,000 more than the $60,000 in emergency funds originally set aside for fuel this school year.
The topic came up when board member Mera Turner asked how the recent rise in gas prices was affecting the school system.
“Listening to the news today about gas prices and stuff, they’re going to be going up and according to them nothing’s going to decrease until after Labor Day,” Turner said. “Now I know when you do the estimates on gas and stuff, you always go above. Do we have enough to cover these huge prices coming?”
Brown said this significant of a rise in prices is still taking its toll on the budget even while taking into account the extra cushion.
“We budgeted an extra $60,000 into fuel for this year and so we know that that’s going to be eaten through pretty well,” Brown said. “We’re already into that some as [finance director] Mr. [Shannon] Christian shared this morning, but we also know that with this last increase that it’s going to go up even more.”
Crunching the numbers reportedly showed that even the emergency funds wouldn’t be enough to make it through the year at this rate.
“[Chief Operations Officer] Greg [Trammell] did some calculations for us on Friday,” Brown said. “Based on the miles per gallon that we’re getting and all we’re estimating that we’re going to need an extra $67,000 to cover our fuel costs for the remainder of the spring.”

BACK ON THE ROAD

Trammell said that this year’s fuel cost projections were already the highest since the pandemic began as school-based travel inches closer to pre-pandemic levels.
“We’ve used 103,000 gallons of fuel,” he said. “That’s how much we’ve had to buy so far this year. We’re projected to use 130,000 and that’s getting back to where we were at before COVID. During COVID, we didn’t run our buses half a year and then we didn’t do field trips or athletic trips and that sort of thing and we just got back to where we’re using the normal amount of fuel again. So I had to look way back to make sure that my target number was close.”
Brown said that the system’s recent bus upgrades have helped schools to be more efficient during this difficult situation.
“Thankfully, we are running more gas-powered buses than diesel buses because the cost of diesel is much higher than gas right now, so making that transition… over the last couple of years is kind of helping us on that,” he said.
As for a solution, Brown said that legislators at the local and federal level could end up lending a helping hand.
“I was in touch with [state rep] Will Wade this week and some of our legislators are trying to get some support from the state from their extra, I guess emergency funds, to help offset some of those costs for us,” Brown said. “And then secondly, Richard Woods in the state department of education has requested approval from the feds to allow CARES [Act Phase] 3 funds to be used to offset some of these increases in fuel, so we’re looking at other avenues.”
Until then, Brown said that the school system’s budget won’t burst if there is no relief.
“Worst case, we’re going to be good,” he said. “To handle a $67,000 increase in our local funds, that’s not something we want to do, but if we have to we can do that.”