District struggles to find happy medium on stops after slew of parent calls
Anyone who regularly attends Board of Education meetings or the district’s annual budget forums knows transportation is near the top of everyone’s list when it comes to changes the schools should make. It has a direct impact on parents’ mornings, as well as on childless motorists, and is the most visible part of school operations.
This year the school district set out to address some of the comments it’s been hearing for years by consolidating bus stops for its 5,500 students serviced by school buses. But the result has been a concern of a different sort.
People have been complaining for years that we should be cutting back on the high school routes, people have been complaining for a long time there are too many bus stops and they’re slowing the traffic down, Superintendent Michael Tebbano said. `We thought that’s what people wanted to have.`
The start of the school year has brought a new battery of complaints that students are being made to walk too far to the new stops, in some instances prompting parental concern about safety. This has caused the Transportation Department to scramble to rework the bus routes, hoping to find a happy medium
Department Supervisor Al Karam said his office fielded approximately 1,000 phone calls and received hundreds of e-mails in the first week of school.
`When the parents finally looked at the routing information they weren’t too happy,` he said.
The complaints were mostly safety related. Parents were concerned their children had to walk too far to bus stops, sometimes in areas with poor or no lighting, no sidewalks or in neighborhoods with sex offenders. And in the era of the cell phone, distracted driving is a constant concern when snow banks might force kids to walk in the roadway.
It’s hard to pin down the exact number of bus stops the district uses. It’s an ever-changing number, but Karam said his system contains around 10,000 stops, some of which are inactive.
To serve as an example, in one Hamagrael Elementary neighborhood the number of bus stops was consolidated this year from 19 to 9. The number of stops has since been increased there.
What’s more is this change didn’t amount to much of a cost savings for the district. Shaving just four-tenths of a mile off the route and decreasing the travel time by two minutes.
`The bus is still traveling the same roads,` Karam explained.
For a department with a nearly $6 million budget, these reductions won’t make waves, or even ripples.
`We decided we probably needed to err on the side of caution and safety,` Tebbano said. `The worst thing we could have is somebody getting hurt.`
One change that will be staying put with some revisions is an expansion of the walking distance from the high school from one half mile to one mile. Voters approved that change in May.
Along the same lines, the district has responded to safety concerns by adding two stops that will service students within the new high school walking distance that would have to cross busy intersections to make it to school.
Stops have been established at Fisher Boulevard and Delaware Avenue, and where Route 32 meets Feura Bush Road. Setting up the new stops is more cost effective than hiring crossing guards, according to the district.
Of course, such changes will eat into the estimated $10,000 in savings the district had expected to realize from an increase in the walking distance. The stops will be added to existing routes, though.
`The bus is going through there anyways,` Karam said.
The district has also announced students just inside the one-mile radius will be able to walk to stops further than one mile from the school, provided there is room on those bus routes to carry them.
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