ALPENA — During Monday’s Alpena Public Schools Board of Education meeting, the board adopted a resolution to enter into a cooperative agreement with the Alpena-Montmorency-Alcona Educational Service District for special education transportation.

The AMA ESD approved during its meeting on June 14 to enter into a contract with Dean Transportation of Lansing. The language in that contract allows for any local partners to join through cooperative agreements.

APS Assistant of Operations Diane Block said contracting with the AMA ESD allows APS to get reimbursed 70 percent for special education transportation costs. Reimbursement costs can only go through an ESD, so APS is entering the cooperative agreement to get the 70 percent reimbursement through the AMA ESD instead of paying 100 percent of the cost through its own contract with a transportation provider.

“We would be paying AMA to transport through this underlying contract with Dean and then we would get an advantage of the 70 percent reimbursement,” Block said.

The total amount of the AMA ESD’s contract with Dean Transportation is $1,055,086. After the 70 percent reimbursement to the AMA ESD, APS is going to have a net cost of $104,044 while the AMA ESD has a net cost of $208,088. Block said the final cost is unpredictable because APS doesn’t know from one year to the next what special education transportation it might need due to students moving.

“My hope is that with a combined system, there might be some cost savings, but at the end of the day, it’s going to be about where the student lives and where they attend and what it will take to get them to school and back,” Block said.

The board also adopted a resolution for a transportation management services contract with Dean Transportation. The contract is from July 1 to June 30, 2023.

“This has to do with how they would structure the contract if we were not a part of it,” Block said. “The promise was that we weren’t in this and AMA and Dean were going to have one person be both director and dispatcher for just AMA special education transportation. We were looking at how we could take advantage of people working side by side.”

With the contract, both APS and Dean Transportation agreed that Dean Transportation is going to provide the services of a part-time transportation director and part-time dispatcher to manage APS’ Transportation Department. The services are going to be shared with the AMA ESD.

Hiring employees is going to be a joint effort with Dean Transportation and the APS administration so both parties can hire qualified and competent individuals to perform the services of the contract. APS is going to complete background checks on potential employees.

The board adopted another resolution for a facility use and management agreement with the AMA ESD and Dean Transportation. Dean Transportation requested to use the district’s transportation facility on M-32 to provide the services in the contract and its use of the facility would be nonexclusive and wouldn’t interfere with APS’ current use of the facility.

Block said a promise in the contract between the AMA ESD and Dean Transportation was that a district would provide a facility and APS negotiated that it would provide the facilities for the AMA ESD.

“We have a facilities arrangement where they would use our bus garage and we have the capacity,” Block said. “They would park their buses there, if they’re parking them there. They may be buses that get garaged at home. Our mechanics would do service on their buses.”

Dean Transportation is going to reimburse APS for any mechanical services performed by APS mechanics starting at $45 an hour in year one.

“In exchange for that, they’re going to pay for all the direct costs for their buses,” Block said.

Board members expressed their feelings about hiring a non-local company, but feel there aren’t a lot of options for the district.

Julie Goldberg can be reached via email at jgoldberg@thealpenanews.com or by phone at 358-5688.