The Graham ISD Board of Trustees made a determination this week that their budget would not allow them to purchase or outfit their buses to comply with Senate Bill 546 mandating three-point seat belts by 2029.<\/p>\n
SB 546 was effective in June 2025 and requires the school districts to make a budget limitation determination by the end of the 2025-2026 school year and submit to the Texas Education Agency the estimated cost to equip each bus operated by or contracted for use.<\/p>\n
\u201cA bus operated by or contracted for use by a school district for the transportation of schoolchildren shall be equipped with a three-point seat belt for each passenger, including the operator,\u201d the bill states.<\/p>\n
The GISD Board of Trustees met Wednesday, April 22 and made a determination that the district does not have the funds to comply with SB 546.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThe state has required that the board of trustees determine whether the cost to retrofit or replace buses and get our entire fleet in compliance with some of the 546, is within the means of our district budget,\u201d GISD Chief Financial Officer Gary Browning said.<\/p>\n
The GISD Board of Trustees voted to approve the purchase of a trip school bus for $156,157 in September 2025 from Longhorn Bus Sales.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cAt this point we\u2019re not required to update our existing fleet with belts, but at some point it would be good to have those available to us and increase the safety for our students,\u201d Browning said in September 2025.<\/p>\n
The board annually budgets for the purchase of one new school bus and previously spoke on the statewide requirement.<\/p>\n
The district has 14 buses with no seat belts and is expecting five new buses each year, which would bring that total to nine. There are currently two buses with two-point seat belts and 10 with three-point seat belts.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is one of those examples of the state wanting us to say out loud that we don’t have the money to fund this by the time, and then turn that information into them,\u201d Superintendent Mary Johnston said. \u201cWhat I am very excited about is that a grant made it possible for us to really be ahead of where we would have been. …I know we are light years ahead of many other districts that have buses that are 30 and 40 years old. …I think we will continue to look for grants.\u201d<\/p>\n
Buses in the bill include school buses, school activity buses, multifunction school activity buses or school-chartered buses. \u00a0The total cost to replace 11 buses at $165,000 per bus will be $1,815,000 for GISD.<\/p>\n
TEA will calculate the total amount of financial assistance needed for all school districts to come into full compliance with the requirements and summarize that for the Texas governor, lieutenant governor, speaker of the house of representatives and each member of legislature.<\/p>\n
“The legislature will meet again next summer, and there is a chance that they will provide additional funding for school buses in particular and transportation. So I think it would be good to wait and see where they land on that,\u201d Browning said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Graham ISD Board of Trustees made a determination this week that their budget would not allow them…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":264520,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[160,162,161],"class_list":["post-264519","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-plano","tag-plano","tag-plano-headlines","tag-plano-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264519","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=264519"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264519\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/264520"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=264519"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=264519"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=264519"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}