LATS agreement with Lawton Public Schools gives students, staff more options

Lawton Public Schools is continuing its longstanding — and popular — agreement with the city’s mass transit system.

Members of the Lawton Board of Education have approved a new transportation agreement with LATS, which has been providing mass transit service to city riders for more than 20 years. As with the agreement approved for the last school year, the district will pay $70,000 to LATS in exchange for unlimited and free service on fixed route buses by LPS students and district staff any time fixed route buses are operating. The agreement means students and staff simply have to show their LPS identification to ride the bus for free.

The $70,000 fee is the same one Lawton Public Schools has paid for the last two school years.

LATS and school district officials have said the partnership brings definite advantages to both entities.

For LATS, the benefit comes from increased ridership numbers on its fixed routes, an important consideration when the system applies for the federal funding that covers 50 percent of operational costs. LATS Manager Ryan Landers said that is why LATS personnel have worked hard over the years to ensure the program remains accessible to youth.

“We’re very appreciative of LPS for continuing the program. It’s been a great thing,” he said.

Landers said the mass transit system has been working to recover its ridership numbers, which fell sharply during the COVID-19 pandemic as businesses and other facilities closed and most schools went to virtual classes. Landers said while today’s ridership numbers aren’t back to pre-COVID levels, they definitely are on the upswing.

“We are up 76 percent from this time last year,” he said, adding records show about 21,000 riders for the first six months of 2023, compared to 12,000 for the same six-month period in 2022.

The agreement with LPS will help those numbers because August and September traditionally are the system’s “big months” as youth return to school. Fixed routes were designated with youth in mind: every school and LPS facility is either directly on a LATS fixed route or within an easy walk.

And LATS plans to help spread the word about the advantages of LATS via presentations to students over the next few weeks as school resumes.

But youth already are discovering the advantages on their own. Early in the program, district and LATS officials decided the free rides wouldn’t be limited to the school day. Students also ride free on weekends, after school hours and during the summer, and they took advantage of that this year, Landers said.

“It was one of our best summers in a little bit,” he said. “It’s definitely improved over the last couple of years. We’re starting to see more students ride during the summer.”

LATS plans to build on that with route changes they will implement as the City of Lawton moves closer to plans to build an indoor transfer center, such as changing service on some routes to multiple times an hour to help meet needs during the busiest times.

“The new routes will be even better because we’re actually going by the schools a lot more,” Landers said.

LPS officials said the program hits the goals the district identified when it developed the program as a pilot in January 2017. The free rides initially were aimed at secondary students, but LPS quickly decided to expand the program to staff members, before deciding in the 2021-2022 school year to include elementary students.

Lynn Cordes, LPS executive director of communications, said the benefit to students can be as simple as getting them to school. She said if a student misses his/her school bus and doesn’t have another alternative, they can simply wave down a LATS bus and get a safe ride to school for free.

“That’s a reliable partnership,” she said.

She said the availability of LATS also means students who want to go to school early — band students, for example — or stay after school for an activity can because they no longer are tied to school buses and set times.

“They have that opportunity,” she said, adding students also are seeing possibilities open outside of school hours, such as having a way to get to and from a job.

For some LPS students, LATS is their everyday ride to school: all students who attend the Gateway Success program at Douglass Learning Center use LATS.

“This is their means of getting to and from school,” Cordes said, explaining Gateway students have flexible school hours, so it make sense to use LATS. “They are not tied to coming in the morning or afternoon. They can come when they need to.”

LATS continues to be a benefit to LPS employees, Cordes said. For some, it’s reliable transportation to get to their job every day. For others, it a free alternative when something happens and they don’t have their own transportation.

“We’re learning what our riders need,” Cordes said, of continuing upgrades to the system, such as an app that shows them where the bus is. “We love that it services our students and our staff. It has only grown in the number of riders as we continue the program.”