ORANGE : District Seeks Bids for School Bus Service

The Orange Unified School District is seeking bids from contractors so trustees can weigh the pros and cons of privatizing school bus service.

The unanimous vote this week to accept bids from private companies put the union representing non-teaching staff on alert, said Barbara Noble, local president of the California School Employees Assn.

“We’re always very concerned whenever they want to privatize,” Noble said.

Trustees voted on Wednesday to compare the cost of the private services to the district’s $3.2 million annual operation in wake of a highly critical transportation study issued in March.

In the study, consultant Virginia Barnes said the department has been deteriorating for at least 10 years.

Critical management positions have gone unfilled, the report said, and the fleet of more than 60 buses is woefully aged. Some of the buses are more than 35 years old, the study found.

Barnes recommended a range of actions to improve the situation, including new buses and a review of all bus stops, some of which the report said are dangerous for students.

The consultant cautioned that contracting out the service will not necessarily take care of the problems.

“It will merely transfer those problems to different departments, different faces and different budget accounts,” her report said.

Assistant Supt. M. Harvey Grimshaw said the trustees will have until October to make a decision on service beginning in January, 1996.

In the interim, officials will try to make the current department as efficient as possible so the comparison will be fair, he said.