EVIT acts to improve transportation issues

The East Valley Institute of Technology has launched a new method for transporting students from nine East Valley district school campuses to its main location.

EVIT now has a two-year agreement with Windstar Lines, a charter-bus rental company, to ferry students back and forth to its Mesa campuses. The company began transporting students on Monday.

In a letter sent to EVIT Superintendent Chad Wilson last week, the school districts alleged that in the first week of providing transportation to students, EVIT has been using commercial ride-hailing services such as Uber and Lyft, and some students were being left stranded.

The letter was issued on behalf of the Queen Creek, Chandler, Gilbert, Higley, Cave Creek, Apache Junction, Fountain Hills, J.O. Combs and Tempe Union school districts.

EVIT denies it used ride-hailing services and instead contracted with Harbor Transportation to provide charter vans.

EVIT Superintendent Chad Wilson conceded there was room for improvement, which led to the change.

“We started the school year off with our vans and the hope that it would be successful,” Wilson said. “We weren’t as efficient and as effective as we needed to be, and so the decision was to transition now to buses.”

In exchange for reducing “pass-through” funding to career and technical education student satellite programs on various school campuses, EVIT agreed to foot the bill to transport students from schools to its main campuses in Mesa. Transportation had been a local district expense under past agreements.

Last fall, the districts sued EVIT when the tech school announced it was reducing the percentage of state funds it doles out to the districts for satellite programs, citing a state audit as its rationale.

Under the new deal, EVIT funding to campuses has been reduced to 76%, but EVIT agreed to absorb up to $5 million in transportation costs to get students to its campuses.

Wilson said EVIT had offered to reimburse the districts up to $4 million for transporting students to Mesa but “obviously that offer was denied” as the districts worked on two intergovernmental agreements with one covering the central campus and the other dealing with the satellite campus programs.

“I didn’t want in that conversation as we moved forward this idea of central campus transportation being held hostage as part of the negotiations,” Wilson said. “It would have been much easier had the member districts agreed to provide the transportation even if it meant that EVIT was paying for it. But like I said, when we made that offer to them as part of the negotiating process, it was rejected.”

A representative for QCUSD countered the districts never took transportation or reimbursement off the table.

“There was language in both the IGAs that we still needed to work through, but there wasn’t an outright, ‘No, we’re denying the $4 million.’ Up until even last week, we were asking to transport students because we know we do transportation well,” said Amber Bordes, chief operating officer for QCUSD.

Also, while the districts usually had one IGA to cover the main campus and satellite programs, they believed it was now essential to have separate agreements to protect all career and technology education students regardless of where they took their courses.

“I think working through the terms of an IGA is not holding it hostage. It’s coming to the table and continuing conversations until member districts were comfortable,” Bordes said. “I don’t feel like that’s holding hostage. That’s just asking for clarity and having further discussions to make sure that we reached an IGA that everyone was comfortable with.

“What we didn’t want to have happen was that we only had an IGA for central campus students and our satellite programming students were ignored.”

As the back and forth continues between the districts and EVIT over the negotiations that resulted in the agreement, EVIT is now in the transportation business.

Wilson said its contract with Windstar is similar to the contract EVIT had with Harbor Transportation, “but it’s more than what we would have spent had the member districts accepted our offer to provide transportation and we reimbursed them the cost.”

“I think one of the things that’s really good about the partner that we have here now is that they’re going to actually become our transportation department … that will handle some of those logistical things that currently aren’t in place the way that we would like them to be,” Wilson said.

Looking to negotiations for future IGAs, Wilson said “the hope would be that both sides would come to the table far more willing to look for common ground than I think either side did when we first started our negotiations.”

“There are some things that are important to us and there are some things I think that are important to the member districts,” Wilson said. “I’m hopeful that by the time we sit back down at the table again, all sides realize that having the disagreements that we’ve had for the past 18 months didn’t provide a resolution that either side is probably very happy with.”

Janet Perez can be reached at jperez@iniusa.org. Please send your comments about this article to AzOpinions@iniusa.org. We are committed to publishing a wide variety of reader opinions, as long as they meet our Civility Guidelines.