COLUMBUS — The Dayton Public Schools busing issue was front and center inside a Columbus courtroom Thursday morning.
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The district’s Board of Education filed a lawsuit against the state this week regarding the new busing law. The district claims they are the only school district in the state that could have been impacted by the law, which makes it illegal for the district to provide RTA bus passes to high school students for transportation.
As shown on News Center 7 at 6:00, Dayton Public Schools Superintendent Dr. David Lawrence said he believes the district community wants them to explore this legal option on behalf of students and parents.
“We heard the community loud and clear, they want us to be a bit more aggressive,” Lawrence said on Thursday.
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The district and the state had their first hearing on the matter Thursday morning in a Franklin County Court of Common Pleas courtroom.
“It directly harms the DPS students,” John Roach, lawyer for Dayton Public Schools, said in court.
Roach told a judge in Columbus that high school students and parents in the district overwhelmingly depend on the school system to get them to school.
“The impact of this law is going to be a lower level of attendance by high school students,” Roach said. “And a lower level of attendance leads directly to lower educational outcomes.”
The school district claims the state requirement to take charter school students to their buildings on yellow school buses doesn’t leave enough drivers and buses for high schoolers. Their solution has been buying RTA passes for those students for the last three school years, but the new state budget eliminated that option.
“DPS had other options,” David Axelrod, lawyer for the State of Ohio, said. “It was not just continue the program, as it existed, or end busing altogether.”
As reported on News Center 7 at 5:00, lawyers for the state claimed they just received the lawsuit and the district’s request for a temporary restraining order (TRO) on Wednesday. They asked for a two-week delay in the TRO hearing.
“The problem is partly of the school’s own making,” Axelrod said.
Lawyers for the district said the state law does not apply equally to everyone in the state. The language said any county between 530,000 and 540,000 people in the last census, which they claim denies rights only to people here.
“The right to use their transit system to get their children to school that every other citizen in the state of Ohio has, except if you happen to live in Montgomery County,” Roach said.
In regard to the TRO, the judge can do three things: deny it, approve it, or delay the completion of the hearing for two weeks, as the state asked.
We’ll continue to follow this case and provide updates.
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