ShawneeDispatch.com

Efficiency and a bit of bulk buying power are about the only tools local school districts have for tackling soaring fuel costs.

Planners in Shawnee's two public school districts, De Soto USD 232 and Shawnee Mission USD 512, employ various bidding and bulk-buying practices that help them get a better price per gallon than citizens filling up along Kansas Highway 7, for example, where unleaded prices hovered around $2.15 on Tuesday. But for multi-thousand pupil school districts, the gallons add up like not even the busiest soccer moms' or downtown commuters' could.

Shawnee Mission burns about 8,000 gallons of diesel fuel every week, and that's just for buses, said Ron Roe, the district's manager of purchasing services. When fuel prices peak, Roe said there wasn't a whole lot more the district could do to cut back on use.

"What we do from the get-go is, when we plan the routes, we plan on trying to use the fewest number of buses possible," Roe said.

Operations and maintenance manager Bruce Kracl runs Shawnee Mission's second fuel-burning fleet.

About 60 service vans, pickup trucks, mowers and other maintenance vehicles run daily between the district's 50-plus buildings. Kracl said he, too, tried to stress good route planning and efficiency but that there wasn't really any way to avoid paying more for fuel in high-cost times, although the district typically budgeted for some amount of inflation.

"You don't anticipate a 40- or 50-cents-a-gallon increase in a year, Kracl said. "You might anticipate a 3- or 4-cent, maybe a dime, increase, but you don't anticipate that kind of jump."

Shawnee Mission contracts for a fuel delivery service to come fill maintenance vehicles' tanks each night, Kracl said, so at least they don't usually burn gas driving to filling stations.

De Soto district operations director Jack Deyoe said the same was true for his district. After the gas purchasing budget was depleted, Deyoe said the district used contingency funds or money saved on heating costs from a mild winter to pay for fuel.

Deyoe said his gallon-guess for this year was right on target but that the price wasn't.

"The thing that we didn't anticipate was this huge jump in costs," he said. "There wasn't any way we could know what was going to happen to us. Everybody got hit."

De Soto has fewer students than Shawnee Mission but is sprawling for its size. Deyoe said district buses used about 2,000 gallons of fuel per week, mostly diesel. De Soto saved some money this year after joining a diesel fuel cooperative with several other public school districts, including Blue Valley and Johnson County Community College, in September. Teaming up helps lower district costs, Deyoe said, as carriers are more willing to shave off some of their transportation prices for bigger bulk purchases than the district could make solo.