McKinney-Vento legislation for transportation of homeless students. In FY26, these funds are used to partially offset transportation costs. McKinney-Vento is budgeted at $420,000 before the anticipated reimbursement of $220,000. Additionally, Newton receives partial reimbursement from the state of Massachusetts for the transporting of foster care students. Newton is expected to receive $20,000 in additional funding for these expenses. Other Transportation Ideas We have previously discussed other cost savings options for consideration which include: ● Allowing school buses to park on School/City property. With this option, our vendor, rather than paying rent, would reduce our daily rate, thus helping to control costs and potentially attract other bidders interested in Newton. To date, we have been unable to find a suitable location to park buses on School/City land, but it is something we continue to believe would be beneficial. This may also have the added benefit of trying to move towards electrifying our bus fleet in the future, which currently has many challenges. ● We have also discussed that Newton, like many communities, provides a much greater transportation service model to our public-school riders than is required under state law. The state law requires public schools to transport students in kindergarten through 6th grade that reside 2.01 miles or more from their assigned public school. We would have very few riders that would meet these criteria and we would save approximately $2.1 Million dollars if we adopted this policy.
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