At least once a year, someone on the School Committee raises the question, “What can we do about user fees?” These are the fees most Harvard families pay for their children to ride the school bus, play a sport, or attend all-day kindergarten. At Monday’s meeting, School Committee members again tackled the problem. The committee hopes to make at least some reductions to the fees before voting on the fiscal 2017 school budget at their Dec. 14 meeting.
For many families, the fees begin with the ride to school. Children in the elementary grades who live more than 2 miles from school are the only ones who ride the big yellow bus free. Elementary students who live closer, and all students in higher grades, must pay to take the bus. The cost is $225 a year for one child, $450 for two; for families with more children, the cost is capped at $600.
According to figures assembled by School Committee Chairwoman SusanMary Redinger, athletic fees for Bromfield students range from $260 to $395, with an average of $320 per student per sport. A family with two kids, each playing two sports a year, pays about $8700 in athletic fees over the children’s time at Bromfield.
Committee member Kirsten Wright strongly urged the committee to give priority to eliminating bus fees, which she called “an unfair burden on working parents.” The cost to eliminate bus fees would be about $60,000 per year, according to Redinger’s estimates.
While other members did not agree completely with Wright, everyone acknowledged that walking to school was not a safe option for most Harvard students, given the lack of sidewalks. “Buses are the safest route to school,” Redinger said, noting that it would also be a boon to reduce the traffic jams around the schools at drop-off and pick-up times. Redinger also noted that Harvard’s bus fees are comparable to those of Littleton, Westford, Chelmsford, and Lexington.
As for athletic fees, eliminating them entirely would cost $240,000—but no one has advocated doing so. The volunteer Athletic Advisory Committee, which brought the issue to the School Committee several weeks ago, asked the School Committee to reduce the fees by covering coaches’ salaries in the school budget. Doing so would add about $124,000 to the budget for fiscal 2017.
Committee member Mary Traphagen, also a member of the athletic committee, said, “We may lose our sports program if we do not reduce fees.” The current fees are inadequate to maintain the program, she said.
Chairwoman Redinger agreed that reducing athletic fees, or at least keeping them level for the next three to five years, should be the top priority. Families are being forced to make choices among the sports their kids can play, she said. Moreover, unlike the bus fees, Bromfield’s sports fees are noticeably higher than those of nearby towns. Nor do Bromfield’s fees have a family cap, as many other towns do.
As for the full-day kindergarten fees, the committee spent little time discussing them. The cost for full-day kindergarten in Harvard is $3,750, which is lower than in Groton, Littleton, or Acton.
Most parents can look back on a time when riding the school bus was free and the only requirement for playing sports was ability. In a telephone interview, former School Committee member Chuck Christenson, of Littleton County Road, recalled that a combination of state funding cuts and “austere local conditions” in the late 1980s and early 1990s forced the committee to introduce the user fees, first for athletics and later for busing. Christenson pointed out that the Harvard Schools Trust was formed during those same years, to augment the school budget.
Christenson said the committee had faced a choice between instituting fees or cutting teaching positions. “We felt the strength of our schools was our faculty,” he said, “and we chose to protect that.” At the time, he said, the fees were considered an emergency measure, which the committee hoped would be temporary.
—Marty Green
