Ga. Ordered to Pay DeKalb Schools For Busing Costs

By Catherine Gewertz

A judge has ordered Georgia to pay one of its biggest school districts $110 million for using a flawed calculation that greatly reduced the amount the state was obligated to pay for busing costs over the past 23 years.

Georgia stretched the interpretation of a state law too far when it concluded in 1978 that it did not need to count students in the DeKalb County district's magnet school program and those in a voluntary-integration program when it calculated transportation costs to be paid to the district, Judge Bensonetta Tipton Lane of Fulton County Superior Court said in a Sept. 17 order. That approach meant the state did not have to pay a portion of the district's costs for those students' transportation.

The state education department again misinterpreted the law, the judge said, when it decided in 1987 that it would count DeKalb's magnet school and voluntary-transfer students as if they attended their neighborhood schools. That method obliged the state to pay a portion of the district's costs to take such students to their neighborhood schools, even though they actually...