Students Forced to Rely on Feet, Not Bus

Instead of catching the school bus after class today, Gary Schwimmer’s two children will walk home from Hillside Junior High School--nearly three miles across train tracks and two of Simi Valley’s busiest streets.

On her first day as a sophomore at Royal High School, Carrie Hartmann’s daughter Lisa will ride in a car pool driven by women she has not met.

In sweeping budget cuts last spring, Simi Valley school board members decided to save about $100,000 by completely cutting bus service to high schools and increasing from 2 1/2 to 3 miles the distance junior high bus riders must live from school.

In all, 737 students at six schools could be affected by the busing changes, school officials said Tuesday.

A dozen parents spoke at a raucous school board meeting Tuesday night, demanding that bus service be reinstated. Several parents offered petitions to the board members and cited the dangers of walking or riding bicycles to school.

School officials responded that budget cuts were made in many areas and that transportation was not immune. “We made cuts to try to keep the educational program as solid as possible. Unfortunately, that meant some programs had to go, and that included bus service,” said Helen Beebe,school board president. “Home-to-school transportation is a luxury. It doesn’t come by the state, and we can no longer afford to pay for it.”

“In our day, one parent was home and could take the child, but now they both work,” said Schwimmer, who declined to give the names of his 12- and 14-year-old children. “The school district or the state should make bus service mandatory.”

It will take Schwimmer’s children an hour to walk home, crossing Los Angeles Avenue, the nearby train tracks and Royal Avenue. He and his wife hope to find a car pool for them.

Hartmann and her daughter live in Wood Ranch, a large development in southwest Simi Valley about five miles from Royal High.

“What totally aggravated me was we didn’t find out until July, and then they had the nerve to send a schedule of the city bus, which doesn’t even stop in Wood Ranch. I was livid, and I’m still mad,” Hartmann said.

“They can’t expect them to walk from Wood Ranch, and riding a bike on Madera Road is bad. The minute school starts, the traffic intensifies.” Madera Road is the busiest stretch of road in Simi Valley, city officials said.

Hartmann said at first that she thought she could take Lisa to and from school. But then she figured out that she would have to leave work in Thousand Oaks in midafternoon, pick Lisa up, take her home and then return to work. So Hartmann began checking around for car pools. Through the school district, she found two women in Wood Ranch who have agreed to give her daughter rides. She will meet them for the first time today.

Meetings were held last month at all but one school to try to find solutions to the commuting problem. Some students from the Indian Ridge housing development and the Katherine Road area who attend Valley View Junior High School will be able to take empty seats on elementary school buses, Assistant Supt. Mary Beth Wolford said. A bus will pick up junior high students in the Wood Ranch area, she added.

School officials say they are doing all they can in light of budget constraints. They will keep track of ridership on the elementary school buses and will make empty seats available to other students, with priority going to seventh-grade students and students who live the farthest away.

Many of the 250 high school students affected by the cuts were used to riding the city bus or car-pooling, Wolford said.

“It hasn’t been a problem for them, but it has certainly been a problem for junior high school students,” Wolford said.

One solution, parents say, would be for the city to expand its bus service in Wood Ranch. The city will conduct a study this fall to determine the need for buses in the area. If the City Council opts to expand the system, the earliest that buses would serve Wood Ranch would be February or March, officials said.

Wood Ranch resident Charles Petrone, whose 13-year-old daughter Charlene will ride a school bus to Sinaloa Junior High School but will not have bus service in high school, said a city bus line is still needed in the development.

“You have kids who have things to do and parents who work,” Petrone said. “It wouldn’t harm to have a bus out here.”