Community Voices in Education Decisions – The Hoover School Bus Controversy – Part I: Background

The sudden decision last July by Hoover City Schools to eliminate school bus transportation in the 13,000 student district shocked the citizens of the Alabama city. The cut, due to start the following school year, was proposed by Superintendent Andy Craig as a way to save a purported $2.5 million a year. In August, before an overflow crowd of parents and community members in a local high school auditorium, Superintendent Craig and CFO Cathy Antee painted a picture of a school system in dire financial straits.   Craig and Antee pointed to years of revenue reductions at the city, state and federal levels to explain why an apparently healthy suburban school system suddenly could no longer afford to transport most of its students to school. In the following months, parents, bus drivers and other interested citizens crowded into every school board and city council meeting to question the decision. Bus drivers began to leave the system for other jobs, assuming that they would be out of work by next May.  However, on Monday, December 9, 2013,  the Hoover School Board suddenly rescinded its July vote. Superintendent Craig said that the system would continue to operate bus transportation, but would attempt to develop a fee structure whereby families would pay for their children to ride to school and extracurricular events.  But the citizens who had formed the Save the Hoover Buses grassroots group knew better than to relax and assume that all was well and they could return to business and lives as usual. While the board’s turnaround was greeted with cheers and relief by the system’s parents and  bus drivers, the transportation controversy revealed a host of troubling issues.