During the past decade, West Virginia education officials closed one of every five schools in a massive consolidation drive. State officials said the closings were necessary because of dwindling enrollments in rural areas.

Parents and consolidation opponents said rural children were forced to ride the bus four hours a day or longer because of the closings. State officials said most children rode the bus for only a short period of time. Each side relied on anecdotal evidence to back their claims.

We started with asking a simple question: "How long are children's bus rides in West Virginia?"

We thought that someone, somewhere within the educational bureaucracy would have attempted to answer that question. Instead, we discovered the state Department of Education had ignored a 1998 state law telling them to study the issue of lengthening bus rides.

Even if education officials had followed the law, West Virginia's antiquated record-keeping system made it almost impossible to answer the question. In other states, school systems keep computerized records of bus routes and riders. But most of the school districts in 35 rural counties did not. In fact, bus drivers themselves kept most of the records by hand.

So we had to construct our own database of 1,569 bus runs in rural counties. We started our project intending to study all bus rides in the state, but we soon discovered that many urban districts also did not keep computerized busing records. We decided to focus on the state's rural counties, in part because that's where the longest bus rides occur, and to keep the data entry manageable.

The process, from FOIA requests to data entry to double-checking, took us eight months. But the resulting ability to write with authority made the effort worthwhile.

In "The Long Haul," published in August, we found the number of children who rode the bus more than two hours a day doubled during the 1990s. Also, we found that two-thirds of bus routes carrying elementary children exceeded state guidelines for a "reasonable" bus ride - an hour per day or less. The average student at Clay Elementary, a typical rural school, spent 37 minutes on the bus each way, nine minutes longer than the average Los Angeles commuter.

Our data helped us locate the best areas for conducting interviews and finding stories. In one county, elementary school students counted the 46 bolts on the roof of their bus to while away their hour-and-40 minute ride to school. Teachers at one high school slipped cups of coffee to 15-year-old students to help them stay awake in class. Parents of one 4-year-old dressed him in his sleep so he could enjoy a few more minutes of sleep before his one-and-a-half hour ride.

Gathering the data

Through the state Freedom of Information Act, we obtained records for bus runs for the state's 35 most rural counties. (Those counties were eligible for federal school construction funds because they were the most sparsely populated of the state's 55 counties.)

At first, several county school systems fought our efforts to obtain the bus routes. Some claimed it contained private information, so we asked them to redact any personal information, such as children's names. Other school systems wanted to charge us large sums for the printing. A couple of counties required us to drive up to three hours to their headquarters to obtain the records.

We created an Excel spreadsheet that included when each run started, when it stopped, and how much time children rode inbetween.

The bus runs represented the longest possible time a child might ride a bus. The run began when the first child stepped on the bus, and ended when the children were dropped off at an elementary, middle or high school. The bus run times did not include the time children stood waiting for the bus to arrive. These were ideal times, not taking into account bad weather or traffic delays.

Calculating with Excel

To determine how long each bus run was we subtracted the start time from the drop-off time. We then used Excel's Count If function to count only the runs that exceeded state guidelines. We divided that by the total count to determine the percent of runs over the guidelines.

The average bus ride could not be tabulated for most counties because the schools don't track when individual children board their bus. Clay County is one of the few that tracks exactly when each child boards the bus and when they are dropped off. Because we had the data, we were able to determine that the average Clay Elementary student spent 37 minutes on the bus, more than the state guideline of 30 minutes. The average middle school student was on the bus for 34 minutes, the average high school student for 38.

We checked our results with transportation directors in all 35 counties, both through phone calls and by sending a copy of their county's data to them through the mail. We made corrections to the database based on their responses. In some cases, we spent half an hour going over a particularly complicated bus schedule with a transportation director.

For purposes of the stories, junior high schools were classified as middle schools. Buses for special education students, who often ride much longer than other students, were excluded from the database.

We also relied upon two surveys of county school transportation directors by the state Department of Education, one in 1992 and the most recent in 1996. The survey asked transportation directors to estimate how many children rode the bus for longer than state guidelines allow.

Those surveys are imperfect, because they rely upon the impressions of the directors and not hard data. For example, one county's survey had exactly 600 students on the bus for one time increment, and exactly 700 for another increment, leading us to believe the times were estimates, not the detailed study state officials led us to believe. If anything, we believed they tended to underestimate the amount of time children spend on the bus, based on comparisons to our spreadsheet.

So far, the story has resulted in a promise from the state transportation director to computerize all bus schedules and complete its own study about the length of bus rides.

We are planning more stories this fall on the damaging effects school closings have on the state's youngest and poorest students.

To see the whole series, visit www.wvgazette.com/news/Closing/

Contact Scott Finn by e-mail at sfinn@wvgazette.com.

Contact Eric Eyre by e-mail at ericeyre@wvgazette.com.