Lawmakers are poised to include $25 million for student transportation in the supplemental budget bill for next fiscal year, $17 million shy of what the Department of Education said it needed to preserve school bus services statewide.

Schools Superintendent Kathryn Matayoshi said Wednesday she’s grateful for the funding and will work to come up with "the least painful plan" for addressing the funding shortfall for school buses. She said she hopes to present recommendations for tackling the shortfall to the Board of Education before the end of the school year.

The student transportation appropriation was agreed to in a House-Senate conference committee Tuesday, and is higher than what both the House and Senate had earlier proposed.

Previously, the department has said that a $17 million shortfall could result in student transportation services being eliminated on Oahu.

While Matayoshi said it will be tough to cover the shortfall, she also said that the department will focus on cutting costs before slashing services. The department also wants to see if it can divert funding to school buses from other programs.

"Seventeen million dollars is a lot," Matayoshi said. "In anticipating that we may not fill the whole $17 million (shortfall) with cost savings, then the contingency planning will begin."

She said she wants to provide parents with as much time as possible to plan for cuts to bus service.

The department has been criticized for warning parents that a multimillion shortfall could result in significant cuts to school bus service.

Last week, House Finance Chairman Marcus Oshiro said the DOE’s repeated warnings about possible massive cuts of school bus service were "irresponsible fear-mongering."

DOE officials previously said that if the department were to get a $23 million legislative appropriation, school bus service would be cut to about 25,000 students — 71 percent of regular education students who ride the bus. No services for special education students would be eliminated.

About 39,000 regular education students statewide ride school buses. Additionally, mandated curb-to-curb service is provided free to about 4,000 special education students.

Lawmakers and others have raised concerns over the rising cost of student transportation, whose price tag has tripled in the past decade to $76 million in fiscal year 2012, in part because of a dearth of competitive bidding.

State Rep. Roy Takumi, chairman of the House Education Committee, pointed out that the department has struggled with shortfalls for student transportation for years, but usually has been able to cover them with federal funds or other state funds.

This year, though, there may not be enough funding from other sources to cover the transportation shortfall.

Takumi added that while the DOE is trying to address the rising student transportation costs, those changes likely won’t happen overnight.