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Hawaii Board of Education members want school officials to respond to the state auditor’s recommendations on ways to fix the district’s broken school bus program.

“We have to be ready to answer to the legislators and the taxpayers,” board member Keith Amemiya told Department of Education Assistant Superintendent Ray L’Heureux.

Board members on Tuesday grilled L’Heureux at their first meeting since State Auditor Marion Higa blasted the department for its ineffective and unsystematic management of student bus services.

, released Friday, blamed the department for failing to rein in skyrocketing costs for bus contracts, which nearly tripled to $72.4 million since 2006.

Civil Beat has been documenting runaway bus costs in its investigative series, Taken for a Ride. The series was the first to report that competitive bidding suddenly dropped off and transportation costs climbed at the same time.

Some of the bus contractors and their representative, John Radcliffe, were at Tuesday’s meeting but did not testify. L’Heureux said they’ve been somewhat silent since the report came out.

The department will address all the serious shortcomings Higa identified in her 54-page report in a multi-pronged approach that will involve going after easier fixes first and implementing actions based on a consultant’s findings later this year, L’Heureux said.

With 57 bus contracts coming up for renewal at the end of the year, L’Heureux said there will be a great opportunity to toughen up the qualifications. He said after the meeting that renewals have been more like a “birth right” instead of a heavily scrutinized area for reform.

Knowing the contractors’ profit margins, for instance, could provide important information for the district to make decisions, he said.

“I can’t influence the procurement statutes of this state, but I can certainly influence the contents of my own requests for proposals. That’s something I can implement immediately,” L’Heureux said after the meeting. “But how am I going to collect my data? That’s something the transportation experts in the field will recommend.”

The district is hiring , a national transportation consultant, to do a comprehensive study and implement solutions. The outside help will cost $109,000. The final report is due Nov. 15.

Board Chair Don Horner and Education Superintendent Kathryn Matayoshi were absent from the meeting Tuesday, so Vice Chair Brian De Lima and Deputy Superintendent Ronn Nozoe filled in.

De Lima and L’Heureux sparred over whether the audit provided solutions, or just detailed the deficiencies.

L’Heureux, who took the reins from Randy Moore eight weeks ago after his retirement, said the audit used data that was not as current as he’d liked to have seen and identified problems with the student bus program that the department has known about for years.

L’Heureux said he did not dispute any of the auditor’s findings, but didn’t necessarily agree with all the recommendations.

He likened Higa’s recommendations to giving a kid a high-powered weapon at a shooting range and just telling him to shoot at the black dot on the target. The department has to find the specifics needed to implement solutions, L’Heureux said.

De Lima said he expects the department to provide specific responses to each of the recommendations the auditor provided.

“It’s the only way we can form our oversight,” he said.

The district in July cut 74 bus routes — impacting some 2,000 kids — to make up part of a $17 million shortfall. State lawmakers gave the department less money than it had asked for to try to force school officials to crack down on the soaring cost of bus contracts.

“The Legislature taking funding away from student transportation in the last session was probably the right thing to do,” L’Heureux said. “It mandated us as the department to say, ‘You know what, they’re right.’ We’ve got to come up with a better way of managing this from a cost-effective standpoint while meeting the requirements of student transportation.”

Some of the bigger money-saving ideas the district is looking at involve staggering school start times to consolidate more routes and eliminating the idle bus fee, a charge the department pays contractors if their buses don’t run due to furloughs or other reasons.

“We’re running out of time on this,” board member Wesley Lo said. “We bought ourselves another year with some pain and some cost. We’ve got to make some decisions soon.”

Tuesday’s discussion on the audit was on the agenda as an executive session item, but De Lima moved it to open session. He said it was going to be discussed behind closed doors because the report was still in draft form when the agenda was posted last week.