No Free Ride : Education: In the Santa Clarita and Antelope valleys, financial pressures have led to expensive school bus fees--and a chain reaction of problems.

At school day’s end, hordes of students frantically push, flail or finesse their way onto Santa Clarita’s red-and-magenta-trimmed city buses, embarking on standing-room-only journeys home that conjure up images of Tokyo’s body-packed subways.

Sitting on laps, crammed five across in seats designed for two and filling up aisles on public transit buses, thousands of students in the fast-growing Santa Clarita and Antelope valleys must deal with a painful truth of the 1990s: Free rides aboard the yellow school bus are over in some districts, a slice of Americana going the way of 25-cent gasoline and drive-in movies.

Children must rely more than ever on public transportation to and from school because of deep budget cuts that school administrators say now force them to save every penny possible so that they don’t have to pull the plug on academic programs.

The result has been expensive new school bus fees--when service is available at all because of tighter new eligibility rules--that many parents say they cannot afford, ranging from $100 per pupil to as much as $440 in the Las Virgenes Unified School District.

In the Antelope Valley Union High School District, students must pay a $100 annual fee. A $200 bus fee instituted in Santa Clarita this school year prompted a dramatic drop in school bus ridership by junior high and high school students--from 2,400 students last year to 1,000 this year.

By contrast, it costs students only about $36 per school year, based on “school tripper” fares of $4 a month, to take public transit in Santa Clarita.

Santa Clarita city officials say the flood of students is an important part of a “considerable” increase in city bus ridership. The number of student passes issued has jumped 43% this year, to 20,809. Overall, bus ridership increased to 57,781 in November, compared to an estimated 37,000 for the same month last year--a surge that set city bus administrators to talking about raising the student pass price to $10 a month to pay for additional service.

Or, instead of taking the bus, students car-pool with parents or friends, ride bikes or simply walk a mile or two between school and home--or, in some cases, as far as two miles between a public bus stop and home.

As thousands of Southern California schoolchildren from the Conejo Valley to Orange County try to live with the new school bus fees, the ritual of traveling to and from school often becomes logistical gymnastics.

“Unless you fight your way on the transit buses for a ride home, you get left three days out of five,” said Jocelyn Sparks, sitting with eighth-grade classmates at Sierra Vista Junior High School in Canyon Country.

“Then you have to wait for the next bus to come along, which is a half hour later. . . . And I know five friends, at least, who were grounded by their parents because they got home a half hour or an hour later than they were supposed to be.”

Classmate Brianne Quinn added that riding a transit bus sometimes becomes a journey into the unknown.

“It’s hard to tell when you’re going to get home or when you’re going to be picked up,” she said. “It depends on traffic. Some bus drivers will say, ‘Oh, I don’t like that group of kids, so I’m not going to stop for them.’ The kids who misbehave on the transit bus mess it up for the rest of us.”

*

As much or more than their children, parents feel the aftershocks of the new fees.

“They don’t leave you much in the way of options. The transit bus doesn’t come up where we live off Sierra Highway,” Pat Wecas said while waiting to drive her son and a friend home from Sierra Vista Junior High School.

“You either cough up the $100 a semester--or too bad.”

She stood beside her car in the midafternoon winter chill and sighed. “It’s costing us more in gas--back and forth, every day, twice a day. Where are we supposed to keep coming up with this extra money?”

And as city buses fill up with schoolchildren, school buses have more empty seats, even though many buses are being removed from service to save money.

Ridership is only 67% of capacity this year on school buses transporting high school and junior high school students in Santa Clarita. On school buses ridden by elementary students in the Newhall School District, the figure is 66%, with ridership dropping to 1,007--a decrease of more than 300 riders, despite an overall increase in enrollment of more than 350 students.

The new fees have spawned changes that are signs of California’s wrenching economic times--and symptomatic of new solutions to old problems made worse by a double whammy of massively crowded public schools and ever-shrinking funds to pay for them.

And the growing trend of school bus fees brings with it sweeping lifestyle changes that only a few years ago seemed unthinkable.

“School transportation has been taken for granted for years as something that happens, but it’s not required by law,” said Gary Smith, coordinator of transportation for the Newhall School District and the William S. Hart Union High School District in Santa Clarita.

“As money becomes tighter and tighter by the state . . . transportation is an area that’s going to be looked at for the amount of money it takes. . . .”

With more children on the loose instead of on the school bus come more complaints about other problems--students jaywalking or crossing streets against red lights so that they don’t miss the public buses, or even deciding to cut classes when city buses become too crowded to give them a ride to school in the morning.

“They do create a traffic hazard,” said a Canyon Country resident who asked not to be identified. “It makes it more difficult when you have to watch out for kids, whereas before they were on school buses going home.”

Pedestrian traffic violations in Santa Clarita have increased dramatically--to 75 between September and November compared with only six during the same period the year before, said Deputy Clint Bowers, a traffic investigator for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

A majority of those cited were students, Bowers said.

“There’s definitely more kids out on the streets, and traffic is definitely more congested because parents are now bringing their kids to schools,” he said. “We’ve had a lot of citizens calling to complain . . . but there’s only so much we can do.”

Although school and law enforcement officials in the Santa Clarita Valley report no evidence of significant increases in truancy, some pupils say that when overloaded public buses do not stop for children, some of them return home rather than wait for the next bus.

“If their parents aren’t home,” said one, “they’ll just tell them later, ‘The bus didn’t come today.’ ”

By law, the state is not obligated to finance public school busing except for students who are handicapped or declared indigent.

Accordingly, some school administrators--their districts battered by slashes in state funding--contend that if they continue to subsidize student transportation to and from school, classroom instruction will suffer irreparably.

At William S. Hart Union High School District, which includes Sierra Vista Junior High School, officials say school bus ridership has decreased dramatically--from 2,400 students last year to 1,000 this year--because of the $200 fee and stricter eligibility rules imposed by the district. Junior high pupils who live within three miles of school, and high school students who live within 3 1/2 miles, no longer qualify to ride the school bus.

The dramatic drop in ridership materialized despite a modest 340-student increase in district enrollment to 10,948.

To date, 13 school buses have been eliminated from service, a move expected to save the Hart district as much as $600,000 this year, officials said. The district expects to save another $500,000 this year by slashing extracurricular transportation by 50%.

In the Antelope Valley Union High School District, a $100-a-year bus fee per student--as well as tighter eligibility requirements--contributed to more moderate decreases in school bus ridership from 2,200 students last year to 2,000 this year, officials say--despite an increase in enrollment of 779 students.

The ridership drop is expected to save the district about $120,000 this year, said Ken McCoy, chief executive officer for the Antelope Valley schools’ transportation agency. Antelope Valley officials expect to save an additional $400,000 by trimming 18 bus routes that also serve junior high, elementary and special education programs.

“What we’re trying to do is get our bus costs as low as possible and still provide satisfactory service to our community,” McCoy said. “That’s a tough one when you have classroom sizes increasing. . . .”

Still, Antelope Valley students appear to have fared better than those in the Santa Clarita Valley because the Antelope Valley has an unusually large number of students from poor families who qualify for indigent status, entitling them to ride free. They fill as many as 40% of school bus seats.

By contrast, Santa Clarita school officials count only 19% low-income riders.

The per-child fees in all three districts are less for families with more than one student riding school buses. Bus fees in the Antelope Valley have been limited to $200 a family. In the Newhall School District, the fee is $200 a year for the first child, $150 for the second and $225 for a family of three or more. The same rates apply in Santa Clarita junior high and high schools, except that the fee for each child after the third is $100 a year.

For the most part, the new fees have served the school districts well, officials say.

“From our standpoint and the district’s standpoint, we do not see a significant negative impact,” said Gary Smith, the school transit coordinator in Santa Clarita.

“But we do know,” he added, “that we have put a new responsibility back on the parents.”

That responsibility, many parents complain, has become too burdensome.

Linea LeQuin of Canyon Country, whose daughter Jaimie is a ninth-grader at Canyon High School, said the new fees have forced her and other parents to make tough choices.

“What’s better?” LeQuin asked. “Having your kid delivered to your home or having food on your table?”

Moreover, the new fees have raised fears of added danger on the way to and from school.

“This area has grown so much; it’s spilling over from the San Fernando Valley and Palmdale,” Sierra Vista parent Pat Wecas said. “There are problems with gangs and accidents. Three miles is a long way to walk for a 12- or 13-year-old--or even to be on a bike. The cars around here . . . don’t stop for each other, let alone a kid on a bike.”

And some students say the crowded city buses are more vulnerable now to problems such as rowdiness, gangs and drugs.

Mark Seamons, an eighth-grader at Sierra Vista, said he saw two boys clasping wads of cash that he presumed came from a drug deal before they got off a city bus at Canyon High School.

“I heard one guy say, ‘I’ve got seven,’ ” he said. “I looked over, and each of them had seven or eight $100 bills. They were wearing gang stuff.”

Such problems “aren’t any different than anywhere else in the city,” said Jeff Kolin, the city’s public works director, adding that bus drivers “can and do” eject troublemakers.

On balance, Kolin said, schoolchildren tend to adjust more easily than parents. “They have a greater tolerance toward unknowns,” he said.

Kolin said that to relieve crowding on city buses, he will again ask school administrators to stagger the beginning and end of the school day at Santa Clarita’s junior high and high schools, enabling the city to double the number of trips the same bus could make during the student rush hours.

But that would also double the costs of accommodating students, he said, and to make up the difference, the city might raise monthly school pass fees from $4 to possibly $10. The idea has been generally well-received by families polled informally by the city, Kolin said, adding: “They also said, ‘Please make sure it doesn’t come close to $100.’ ”

Meanwhile, even hard-pressed families say they haven’t ruled out putting their children on the school bus next fall, regardless of the fees.

“I have many friends who aren’t happy with this,” Karen Douglas of Canyon Country said as she waited to pick up her daughter Krystal and a friend at Sierra Vista.

“I’m paying . . . for an extra tank of gas a month,” she said, “and that’s a little more than the $20 a month I’d have to pay for the school bus. We’re considering signing up for the school bus next time.”

She paused. “But I don’t want them to win,” she said of school officials. “Consider this a silent protest. I don’t think it’s right that they charge for bus transportation.”