The Greene County School Board met in special session Wednesday.

The Board voted unanimously to deny a shared sports transportation request. The Board looked at transporting students in all shared sports programs including girls and boys swimming and soccer. Both sports are shared with Boone.

Superintendent Tim Christensen presented the Board with some cost estimates of how much the district would pay for a bus driver to transport students for each sport and the total was $12,500. There was a separate estimate to bring back the sports shuttles which were cut last year and that total was $17,000.

Board member Sam Harding explains why the Board denied the request.

“Well it came down to cost factors. When we’ve just cut our budget and cut a P.E. teacher, cut a preschool teacher and have a still very tight budget, there’s not $30,000 in it. It would just be a poor decision for us to spend money that we don’t have.”

The transportation budget is tied directly to the general fund budget, which the Board made a $500,000 cut for the year.

Parents of the girls soccer team made a request for the Board to reconsider transporting their children to Boone, due to safety concerns of the students driving themselves. Every board member agreed with the concerns, but felt that the budget didn’t allow for them to approve the request.