The Bus Route That Cost Less Than Their Mileage
I could have filed a complaint with the state. Eli has a plan on file at the school, a federal document that lists what the district has to provide, and transportation is written in it plain as day. But a complaint goes to Jefferson City, and a complaint takes months. Eli would have been home at the kitchen table all fall and all winter, a smart boy in a clean shirt with nowhere to go.
I decided I was not going to beg. Mark had asked nicely, and he had been thanked, and nothing had moved.
That Friday night I came home and told Eli I did not know what to do.
He was at the kitchen table with his laptop and a bowl of cereal for supper, because Mark was still out on the road. He looked up at me with his father’s gray eyes and his own look, the one that says I am about to be reasonable with you.
“Mom,” he said, “don’t make it a sob story.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
“You were thinking about it. You get a thing with your jaw.”
I laughed. I couldn’t help it.
“Make it a spreadsheet,” he said.
“A what?”
“The board says it saves $11,000. Okay. Where does the money go? That’s all a budget is.” He turned the laptop around. He had already pulled up the district’s posted budget, a 64-page PDF nobody in the county had ever read. “I run the clock for the football team, Mom. I can make a spreadsheet. If they want to talk about money, let’s talk about money.”
I looked at my fourteen-year-old son, who could not get to his own school, and I thought: this child has more sense than the whole board put together.
“What do we need?” I asked.
He tapped the screen. “We need to know what they spend on themselves.”
Missouri has a law called the Sunshine Law. It says that public bodies have to hand over their records when a citizen asks. You do not need a lawyer to use it. You write a letter that says, I am requesting the following records, and you sign your name. I wrote mine on notebook paper that Saturday, Eli typed it up, and on Monday I drove it to the district office myself.
The business manager was a woman named Kay Sutter, about my age, with reading glasses on a beaded chain and a pen clipped to her cardigan. She took the letter from me and read it twice.
“The law gives me three business days,” she said.
“I know.”
“I’m not going to need three.”
She went in the back. She came out in ten minutes with a thick manila folder and set it on the counter between us. Then she did a thing I did not expect. She took a yellow highlighter out of her cardigan pocket, put it on top of the folder, and slid it toward me.
“I didn’t write the budget,” Kay said quietly. “I just keep the books. The $11,000 was the net, after state transportation aid. It cost $38,900 to run that route and the state sent back $27,900. I told them that number. I did not tell them to cut it.”
“I know you didn’t.”
That night Eli and I went through the folder page by page, with Mark across from us eating a cold plate of supper with his boots still on.