Staff Photo by Gillioan Bolsover -- A bus driver prepares to pull out of the parking lot at Ooltewah Middle School after picking up students.

Last year, when gas was about $2.70 a gallon, Mary Faucett didn’t think twice about driving 20 miles round-trip to take her daughters to school.

But now that the price of gas has increased more than a dollar per gallon, Mrs. Faucett and her husband, Brad, decided to cut costs and send their first- and third-graders on a school bus to Westview Elementary in East Brainerd.

Emma, 9, and Elizabeth, 6, must leave their house about 40 minutes earlier every morning, but the money savings seemed the obvious answer, Mrs. Faucett said.

“We just didn’t want to be going back and forth because of the gas prices,” she said.

With the runup in fuel costs, more parents this year are turning to the free transportation offered by local school systems, administrators say.

“That’s probably one of the first luxuries a parent looks at cutting back,” said Wayne Hendrix, director of transportation for the Hamilton County Department of Education. “When they have that yellow bus driving right by their house, why would they want to pay the money to take Johnny and Suzie to school?”

In Hamilton County, about 300 more students are riding the bus this year than last, Mr. Hendrix said. Although they don’t have exact figures, administrators in Whitfield County, Ga., also have noticed more students riding the bus this year, spokesman Eric Beavers said.

Catoosa County, Ga., has about 1,500 more bus riders than last year, partially because of the new Heritage High School, which opened in August, spokeswoman Marissa Brower said. Still, the district has added three regular bus routes, two special-education bus routes and split two routes. The increase in ridership and routes cannot be attributed solely to the new high school, she said.

“When fuel costs spike is when we see a spike in ridership,” she said.

The same higher fuel costs driving parents to school buses also affect the school systems’ budgets, officials say.

Catoosa County administrators budgeted $425,000 for fuel last year but have had to bump that number up to $785,000 this year, Ms. Bowers said.

Beyond the five buses Hamilton County added this year because of growth — including the new Signal Mountain Middle-High School — administrators say they hope not to add any new routes, which cost the system about $55,000 each.

Instead, by the end of the month, they will have shifted routes to make sure each bus is operating at full capacity, Deputy Superintendent Rick Smith said.

“They will look at each individual route, and they’ll adjust those route sizes,” he said.

Hamilton County pays Durham School Services a flat rate to operate most of the district’s school buses. In addition, the school system pays a fuel supplement to adjust for the high price of fuel. Last year, the system shelled out about $400,000, and this year Mr. Hendrix expects to pay more.

“I would think that number would probably be conservative,” he said. “The numbers this year have already exceeded what we saw last year.”