No, they belonged to the Orleans Parish School Board, which was "negotiating" with the City Of New Orleans to use school buses for hurricane evacs as late as June 9, 2005.
I posted those June 9th School Board minutes on several FR threads - they are quite detailed verbatim mminutes - and they also propagated externally to several blogs.
Reading the minutes, there is no question - I mean zero - about who "owned" and controlled the buses. On June 9th, the Board was still dithering about gas costs, paying drivers, bus security, etc. It's all there in the minutes.
Subsequently the Orleans Parish School Board was effectively replaced by a private turnaround/management firm in July 2005 due to corruption and financial mismanagement (e.g., being $25 million in the hole).
It seems highly unlikely that the school bus issue was ever resolved between June 9th and August 27th.
Problem is if he had any ____ he could have taken the buses and worried about the issue after the fact. The other problem is that the MSM, SO called hearings where Blanco refused to answer any questions and Nagin certainly isn't going to take the blame. Because GWB decided to take all of FEMA's responsiblity, and made it easy for the state and local to sit back and hehe about it. You certainly won's see Michael Moore commenting on cities stupity and lack of leadership.
One open question is whether these buses were operational.
For an unrelated example of FEMA messing up with buses, see this surprisingly ignored story:
http://katrinacoverage.com/2005/09/24/femas-buses-subcontractor-farmed-it-out-massive-confusion-landstar-to-blame.html