Parents Try to Save El Segundo Bus Service

Angered over the decision by El Segundo school officials to curtail student transportation services beginning this fall, a group of parents are appealing to city and school officials to find a way to keep the services alive.

At a packed school board meeting Tuesday night, parents alternately scolded board members for ending the free services and pleaded with the board to explore ways to pay for student transportation, including approaching private industry to pick up the tab.

“We are hoping we can keep the buses and get some money for next year,” Margie Randall, the mother of two elementary school children, said before the meeting.

Board members were not optimistic that the free service could be saved.

Randall said she is primarily concerned about elementary school children who will no longer be shuttled from the district’s middle school to the Center Street elementary school across town. She said some youngsters would be forced to walk more than a mile to school unless parents arrange for other means to get them there.

“I know the fourth- and fifth-graders can handle it, but the first-graders can’t,” she said.

District Supt. Richard Bertaine will meet with City Manager Fred Sorsabal on Friday to discuss the matter. City officials, who met with about a dozen parents last week, said they would determine if any city and school services could be consolidated, with the savings going toward the district’s transportation programs. Such services might include custodial duties, city officials said.

Until the end of the school year in June, the district had provided free transportation for students competing in inter-school athletics and for some elementary school students.

School board members, struggling to balance the district’s $7.6-million budget, voted in late May to end these services and impose an as-yet-undetermined transportation fee on student athletes. By ending both services, the 1,820-student district, which owns four buses, estimates that it will save about $66,000 annually.

Although the board’s decision to require athletes to pay a fee--a plan that other financially-strapped school districts, such as the Palos Verdes Peninsula Unified School District, have adopted--has angered some parents, the decision to end the shuttle service for the younger children has aroused the most emotion.

Bertaine said the shuttle service was started five years ago when the district, faced with a declining enrollment, turned one of its two elementary schools, the Richmond Street school, into the El Segundo Middle School. To serve elementary students in the Richmand neighborhood, the district began busing them to the Center Street school.

District officials estimated that the shuttle last year served about 150 children a day, picking them up at the middle school in the morning and returning them in the afternoon. The two schools are about three-quarters of a mile apart.

But Bertaine and other school officials said the district never intended for the shuttle service to be permanent. For at least two years, discussions have been going on about ending it as a cost-cutting measure.

“The board’s commitment in 1983 was that the district would provide that service for at least one year,” Bertaine said. “Obviously, we have struggled to keep it going as long as we could.”

Even though board members have agreed to reconsider their decision to end transportation services when they meet July 26, Bertaine said he was not optimistic the services would be restored unless a new financing source is found.

Board members David Jones and Alan Leitch said in interviews that the district is faced with having to make a number of cutbacks to maintain a reserve fund equal to 3% of its total budget. That percentage is recommended by county school officials.

“I would rather see (transportation services cut) than have to cut a teacher’s position or not get new textbooks,” Leitch said.

Councilman Scot Dannen, who attended the school board meeting Tuesday, said afterward that he favors the city stepping in and temporarily paying for the transportation services, even though the city has struggled in recent years to balance its own budget.

“I am in favor of bailing the district out on a short-term basis because we are talking about our children,” he said.