MARYSVILLE – About 300 students who rely on bus transportation to and from classes in the Marysville Exempted Village School District missed the first day of school last week as glitches in the district’s transportation department led to those students waiting at stops for buses that never arrived.
At the MEVSD board of education’s regular monthly meeting this past Thursday, Aug. 15 the District’s Director of Operations told the board that faulty staff work, poor planning and software issues led to those students not being bused to school, which resulted in scores of phone calls to the school by angry parents, calls that went unanswered or were not returned as of Thursday’s meeting.
The board was informed that the transportation staff will spend this weekend and the first of the coming week redrawing the bus routes, but as of Thursday, there were still approximately 100 students who count on the buses for transportation to and from school that remained unassigned to a busing route.
This was but one of a series of recent setbacks for the district, which has a 5.5 mill property tax levy on the ballot in November. A school levy that was before Marysville voters in May 2023 was voted down by a large margin and, should November’s levy fail, the district expects to have no cash reserves on hand by 2027, leaving the district at high risk for being declared to be in a “fiscal emergency” and having its day-to-day operations being taken over by the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce.
The district has already implemented a hiring freeze, eliminated numerous staffing positions and instituted a “pay-for-play” for most extra curricular activities, to include not paying for transportation and assistant coaches for the various sports teams. A failure of November’s levy will force the district to enact even more cuts, mostly to arts, music and Advanced Placement classes, as well as raising the “pay-to-play” fees to over $700 per activity with no cap on a family’s financial “pay-to-play” obligation in any given school year.
