Pahrump children riding buses without air conditioning

PAHRUMP -- Bus driver June Wilkins wields her spray bottle like a six-gun. She sprays herself and the students with water, then hooks the bottle on a rearview mirror, its makeshift holster.

"When we stop, it gets unbearable because there is no air moving," she said from behind the wheel Wednesday. "It's really bad for the driver because of the heat of the engine. The bottom of my feet burn the whole time."

This is the first year Pahrump has had year-round schools and the first time students have felt the inside of a bus in summer -- without air conditioning.

After a week of scorching heat with temperatures inside the bus reaching between 110 and 120 degrees with the windows down, some students and parents are complaining.

"It's hotter than it is outside, that's for sure," eighth-grader Christina Balentine said, several sweat-soaked strands of hair stuck to her brow. "The air is just really hot."

It's typically a little cooler in Pahrump than in Las Vegas. But drivers in this small town agreed that temperatures inside the cramped confines of their steel-hulled buses feel worse than the thermometer indicates.

"We try to spray the kids down, give them water to drink, and apple juice," driver Susan Ferro said. "Sometimes, the students say they feel like they're going to puke."

Pahrump is a dusty community of less than 30,000 in Nye County, just over the Clark County line. But like booming Las Vegas 50 miles to the east, the town has been dealing with its own growing pains in recent years.

New families moving to Pahrump have pumped its five schools full. Enrollment is now 4,000 students, up from 2,000 five years ago.

Facing crowding at a crisis level, officials last year converted the town's three elementary schools and one middle school into year-round buildings, where three-fourths of a school's enrollment attend at any given time. The Pahrump schools were the only Nye County schools to convert to the year-round format.

Officials air-conditioned the four Pahrump buildings, but money ran out before the buses could be retro-fitted. Now about 2,000 students -- some of whom ride for up to 40 minutes -- are suffering, parents say.

"It isn't fair, and it isn't right," said the mother of a 9-year-old bus rider. The mother, who declined to state her name, said she wrote to government officials warning them that the buses were an "absolute health hazard."

Nye County has no acting health officer. State health officials say the school district is responsible for student health. But one official says there is probably no cause for alarm, as long as there is water on the bus.

"From my perspective, the school district is taking action to avoid heat injury," said Luana Ritch, Nevada public-health education and information officer, who spoke to Assistant Superintendent Rodney Pekarek last week. "They are concerned for the children as well as for the drivers, and they are searching for both short-term and long-term solutions."

Still, no one is questioning that the buses are painfully uncomfortable these days.

"After a while, you sometimes feel like you want to pass out," driver Pam Keogh said.

School officials said they don't have the money to air-condition their 30 or so big yellow rigs at a cost of about $17,000 each.

"Budget is certainly the primary factor," said Marshall Folstot, administrative assistant to the superintendent. "Air-conditioning the buses would be a wonderful advantage for the students in Pahrump. It just fiscally was not possible."

The Pahrump bus problem could be symbolic of a larger issue that rural Nevada districts sometimes face: It costs more to run their expansive districts that include many miles of desert and just a few far-flung schools.

"It's a geographic nightmare," Pekarek said.

Nye County's 15 schools are spread over 18,400 square miles in seven towns, two of them more than 200 miles apart. That means transportation, maintenance and food-service costs shoot up, officials say.

"We're talking economies of scale over there (in Clark County) we don't have," said Bill Merrell, director of building and finance for the Nye district. "The extra money we get per student doesn't go that far. I'm running a school in Duckwater that is costing us $7,841 a kid."

The State Department of Education tries to solve the problem of poorer vs. wealthier districts. In an attempt at equity, the state doles out money to the state's 17 county school districts according to student density in the county and transportation factors and also according to the wealth of the county.

For instance, Clark County ultimately gets $1,495 per student from the state, while Nye County gets $3,652 per student.

That's because Clark County can generate more for itself in property and sales taxes for schools -- $3,012 per student -- compared to the $1,084 generated by Nye County taxes.

The grand totals equal $5,537 per Nye student and $4,507 per Clark student in combined county and state funds. (Districts also generate smaller amounts of money from other sources, such as the federal government.)

So why does Clark County have 300 to 400 air-conditioned buses for its summer runs, while Nye County has none? Mostly because the Nye district threw its money into other projects this year to prepare for year-round classes.

Officials air-conditioned the four buildings, a $1.4 million upgrade. Personnel costs also shot up $800,000 to staff the buildings 12 months instead of nine.

"It's been an expensive proposition," Pekarek said.

Now officials have little money left over and are scrambling for solutions to hot buses.

Officials are considering swamp coolers as a temporary solution, but those can cost about $5,000. Officials also are examining whether painting the tops of buses white might help. (It's made a few degrees of difference in initial tests.)

"I know it's got to be hot on the buses," School Board President Richard Scanlon said. "But there's a lot of older-model cars out here without air conditioning, and people roll down their windows and make their kids sit in that -- then they make a big stink of it on a bus. It's got to be done; it's a matter of where do we get the money."

Board member Debbie Wescoatt also said the bus issue hinges on the budget.

"It's a concern of the board. We're keeping tabs on this. We'll look at it again," said Wescoatt, who has a son and three nieces who ride buses. "I'm well aware of how hot it is. They're not happy."

Neither are students such as Daniel Latz-Harrington. The eighth-grader last week stepped off the bus into the heat of the day, relieved to out of the sweltering rig.

"You walk in there and you just sweat," 14-year-old Daniel said. "But what can you do?"

Worry, for now, answers Daniel's mother, Bonnie Harrington.

"I was concerned because it does get hot," Harrington said. "He comes off the bus and it looks like he's been running around outside."

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