Columbus Municipal School District voted in a special-call meeting Friday to mutually end its contract with Ecco Ride, a private transportation company that had hired, trained and organized bus drivers for the district since 2013.
The decision came as schools remain shut due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which has halted all bus operations of the district.
David Dunn, the district’s attorney, said during the meeting a “force majeure” provision of the contract allowed for the mutual termination upon catastrophic events and freed both parties from their liabilities.
“Basically, there will be no payment of additional monies from the school district going forward,” he said.
The CMSD is in the third year of the four-year contract renewed in 2017, which required the district to pay approximately $2.2 million a year to Ecco Ride. The district has paid roughly $1.1 million this year, CMSD Board of Trustees President Jason Spears told The Dispatch on Friday.
The contract allowed the district to lease five buses from the company starting 2017 and purchase each bus for $1 each after 10 years of use, Dunn told The Dispatch. Now that the contract is terminated, he said, Ecco Ride will keep the five buses.
“Everybody’s basically taking their buses and walking away,” he said during the meeting.
That leaves the district 65 buses on its fleet, half of which are buses up to 6 years old, Superintendent Cherie Labat told The Dispatch.
Additionally, the responsibility to house and insure all the district’s buses, which Ecco Ride used to take care of, has now fallen on CMSD.
Labat told The Dispatch the district secured insurance for all its buses Friday morning after the meeting but did not disclose the cost of the insurance by press time.
As for housing the district buses, she said she would explore the possibility of storing them on district properties.
Moving forward, Labat said the district will set up its own transportation services department instead of contracting with a private bus company.
“We would assume the responsibility of getting some leadership in here to work on the routes and … hiring more bus drivers,” she said.
The pandemic, Labat said, left the district with no other choice but to provide transportation services on its own. The uncertainty of when schools are allowed to reopen, however, she said, makes it difficult for CMSD to plan for transportation services.
“We don’t have a definitive decision if we are going back to school in the fall,” she said. “It’s (hard) to make this internal process because then we are not paying people left there working, and we are not going to provide services unless we are picking up kids from school.”
It remains unclear how the termination will financially affect CMSD, Labat said. But the district has conducted a cost analysis, she said, which indicated that the district is capable of meeting students’ transportation needs within its current budget.
“It’s too early to tell because we don’t know what the school is going to look like in the fall; we don’t know if we will have to run double routes,” she said.
The district will discuss more details of its transportation plan at the board’s May 11 meeting.
Yue Stella Yu was previously a reporter for The Dispatch.
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