Your T1 reports are due on or before October 31. The data for your report is to be collected in the first week of October, when your school is open for five days. The legal basis for these reports is established in the Ohio Revised Code.
There are some critical points that you should observe:
1.) Count all students who ride (not only those who live more than one mile from school). All students who ride are eligible to be counted in accordance with the Revised Code.
2.) Count students both in the morning and the afternoon. The law allows you to report the greater of morning or afternoon ridership.
3.) Do not forget to count your noon bus riders (kindergarten and preschool).
4. ) You need to record the miles driven to each school, and report a total mileage for each day.
The general process is to count students and miles daily for five days, and then report the daily average for that five-day period.
It is critical to your district’s funding that you accurately report nonpublic and community school riders and miles travelled. The transportation funding formula pays more for nonpublic and community school transportation than it does for public school transportation.
The best way to separate the counts and miles is to have your drivers count students when they enter or leave the school where they are educated – do not count them at transfer points. If you have students that ride “collector” routes and then transfer, have your drivers let them off the bus first in the morning and count the remaining students that are attending the school where the bus is located. The “transfer students” will be counted when they get to their ultimate destination. Use the opposite process in the afternoon.
Another way to think of this is to consider the portion of each bus route that stops at a school for loading or unloading students a “trip”. This makes it easy for you to identify which trips go to public, nonpublic, or community schools. For most districts, every bus will have at least four trips every day, and perhaps as many as 8-10 if they have transfer trips and extra tiers.
In general, we have found that it is best to have drivers record their mileage when they leave the bus lot in the morning and then at each school where they stop, and then again when they return to the bus lot. This will allow you to separate the mileage by type of school for the report.
The bottom line on the T1 is that you must submit something by October 31. If you do not submit your report, your district’s transportation funding will stop. Get a report filed and submitted – you will have an opportunity to amend and complete a new count and amend the report on or before January 31. DO NOT just sit on an incomplete report and fail to file by the October deadline.
If you have questions, please reach out to Pete at schoolbus@ebconsultinggroup.com. This is a very important first step in establishing your school district’s transportation funding for the year.
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