The St. Joseph School District is replacing and increasing its special education bus fleet at a price officials said came in below budget.

Roy Lashbrook, purchasing manager with the district said the effort originally started out with the current budget allotment for the year of around $100,000.  He said the goal was to try to find a new or used bus, or a couple of used buses to try to replace some that were extremely old.

“This effort kind of blossomed into a little more creative purchasing route,” Lashbrook said. “We decided to purchase them on a capital lease purchase program. Basically, take our current budget year money and the next four years, actually five as it turned out to see if we could stretch that without spending any extra money moving forward year-to-year.”

The district ended up purchasing 10 new buses; nine of those arrived at the district Friday morning.

“Five years, six payments, because we had six years of budget money to work with. It was $594-thousand and change is what it came to. So we’re actually spending less than what we would normally have budgeted year-to-year for this outlay and we quintupled the number of buses that we were able to have access too immediately,” Lashbrook said.

While the district contracts with Apple Bus to transport most students in the district, Lashbrook said the new buses are part of the SpEd fleet which is used for preschool, special needs, and transportation for homeless students. He said, previously the fleet consisted of several buses as old as the late 90s with over 300,000 miles and some without air conditioning.

“We also, were able to make sure that through this deal that all of our on-board camera and monitoring systems were updated…Then we’re going to update the rest of the feet to that standard over the rest of the summer of the existing buses that we have in the fleet,” Lashbrook said.

The addition of the 10 new buses brings the district’s fleet up from 19 to 23 after trading in six of the old buses. Two of the new buses also came with wheelchair lifts, a feature Lashbrook said was only available on one bus prior.

He said the new buses will also save the district money on maintenance.

“One of the reasons we couldn’t trade in our sixth bus was because it was out at a third party service provider just getting back to where it would be roadworthy enough to trade in,” Lashbrook said.

The final new bus is expected to arrive next month.