Prince George’s County Public Schools will pilot a hub busing system — centralized school bus stops for students who attend schools outside their neighborhood’s district — this fall at the Academy of Health Sciences in Largo to weigh the possibility of expanding such a system to all specialty schools and reduce the $140 million transportation budget.

But parents whose children attend specialty schools aren’t sure they want a hub system to replace routes that bus their children directly from neighborhood to school.

“One of our biggest concerns when they first proposed the hub system [for fiscal 2012] was that there would be no additional personnel added to supervise the school [hub] sites,” said Nicole Nelson, president of the parent-teacher-student association at John Hanson Montessori School in Oxon Hill.

The 200 high school freshmen and sophomores who will attend the Academy of Health Sciences, a specialty school that opened in fall 2011 at Prince George’s Community College, will be bused in the mornings to their neighborhood schools and then ride a separate bus to the college campus, said Superintendent William R. Hite Jr. in a presentation of budget-reducing recommendations to the school board last month.

But other specialty schools’ “transportation would still operate very much as it operates this year,” Hite assured board members and parents.

School officials are still determining the bus routes for the academy’s hub system, but it may only work in the mornings, Deputy Superintendent Bonita Coleman-Potter said, adding that estimates on possible savings from a countywide hub system were not yet available but may come out late next week.

The hub system pilot is one of several long-term suggestions a transportation task force of state, county and school system officials proposed to Hite.

Short-term suggestions — pegged to cut transportation costs by $3 million next year — included tweaking start and end times for middle and high schools so students from both could ride buses together, and consolidating bus stops that serve few students, Coleman-Potter said.

Excluded from changing bell times are middle schools that will see sixth-grade students added to their school this fall under the recently approved changes to the grade structures at eight middle schools, Coleman-Potter said.

Consolidating bus stops within a neighborhood where just one or two children are picked up makes more sense than a hub system, said Nelson, whose children are in kindergarten and first grade at John Hanson Montessori.

Jeanette Copeland, whose children are in kindergarten and sixth grade at Thomas G. Pullen Creative and Performing Arts School in Landover, said she would rather see the school system fill its buses to capacity to cut costs rather than put children on two buses to get to school.

“I hate the idea [of a hub system],” said Copeland, who lives in Lanham. “We’d have to take our children to our school, sit and wait, and then be bused to Pullen.”

Hite said school officials also will be adjusting routes to increase the number of students picked up at each stop from the current average of 3.8 and the distance students now walk to a bus stop from 0.25 miles to 0.5 miles.

“We’ll continue to look at increasing the number of yards children would have to walk while still keeping them safe,” Coleman-Potter said.

The task force also recommended increasing the number of students able to walk to school by working with the county to improve sidewalks and with the police department to increase the number of crossing guards. The police department now employs 127 crossing guards at public and private schools in the county, said Cathy Tayman, the supervisor of the unit. To be fully staffed, the unit would need 153 guards.

County Councilman Derrick L. Davis (D-Dist. 6) of Mitchellville said he will be looking not necessarily for cuts to transportation expenses but for the most efficient use of all funds allocated to the school system when the council reviews the school system’s budget this spring.

The school board will reconcile its final budget with the county-approved budget in June.

“It’s not as simple as subtracting something from here and adding it to there,” said Davis, adding that substantial savings could be used for reducing class sizes or funding pre-kindergarten. “[We have] to get the maximum efficient use out of every dollar ... so we can make sure we have an effective school system for every child,” he said.

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