Schools wrestle with energy prices

Their jobs require Bob Martin and Angi Gardinier to play energy poker with school district money. In their case, though, the trick is deciding when to fill ’em, not fold ’em.

Martin is the facilities director and Gardinier is the transportation supervisor for the Sisters school system. He has to keep heating oil in the tanks at all three district schools while she has to keep a fleet of 13 school buses running on diesel.

“In August, when I did a market check,” Martin said last week, “the price (of heating oil) was $2.15 a gallon. Ted (Superintendent Ted Thonstad) and I talked and decided to go ahead and fill all the tanks in the district. This was two or three days before Katrina hit, so it was very fortuitous that we did that.

“When I checked 10 days ago it was at $2.56, then it went to $2.75. It’s come back down a little since then but the heating oil folks are saying it’s not gonna get back down to $2.15. It appears that we made a good buy.”

Over in the bus barn near the elementary school where she has her office, Gardinier said that during the few days of August that schools were open she paid an average of $2.48 a gallon for diesel fuel for buses.

“I budgeted for what I thought was really a pie-in-the-sky amount for this school year…$3.10 a gallon,” she said. She now figures she’ll be lucky to live within that. Last year she budgeted $25,850 for fuel but the total bill came to $29,394. “So we went over by a little and frankly I though I had budgeted hugely last year as well.”

The buses get beween eight and 12 miles a gallon, depending on conditions and where they go. They traveled a total of 154,865 miles last school year. Gardinier says that so far the district has invoked no changes in routes, coverage or service.

Martin said that for the current year he budgeted “right around $2…and I’m already spending 15 cents a gallon more than that.” Last year he budgeted a total of about $70,000 for heating oil and the final bill was “considerably more than that.” His average cost per gallon for 2004-05 purchases was $1.60 at the high school, $1.47 at the middle school and $1.53 at the elementary school, in all cases more than 40 cents per gallon above the average for the year before.