A Student’s Long Trek for an Education : Education: Pupil’s plight reflects hardships faced by thousands in L.A. district.

As most of his classmates are still stretching and yawning in their beds, Jose Delgado shivers in the dark, waiting to begin his 75-minute journey to school.

The 8-year-old’s daily bus trip from Berendo Middle School west of downtown is a circuit through neighborhoods like his own: urban swaths of large families and cramped living that have far outpaced local schools’ capacities.

Along the way, Route 3571 will scoop up an additional 38 children for drop-off before first bell at three elementary schools on the Westside with room to spare.

“We go to another school and another school and another school,” is the way Jose explained it as he boarded the bus at 6:48 one morning last week.

Although such a redistribution looks reasonable on paper, in human terms it is distinctly unreasonable: asking children as young as 6 to waste more than two hours of their day on a bus in order to spend a little more than twice that in a classroom.

“Just put on your hat as a parent,” said Bruce Takeguma, a busing specialist for Los Angeles Unified. “I have three little ones, and the thought of that . . .” he trails off, shaking his head.

The wisdom of the practice has come into question again after two young bus riders were killed in a freak accident. But without money to build schools in the pockets of population explosion, there is not much more the district can do to get children off the buses.

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In the last five years it has reduced such overflow busing by nearly two-thirds--from 27,000 to 10,000--by moving portable classrooms onto campuses, transferring sixth-graders to middle schools, cramming more children into classrooms, scheduling classes year-round, and wooing more students into magnet programs.

Despite such efforts to take care of their own, the dozen or so elementary schools near the start of Route 3571 must bus enough children to fill at least three giant schools.

City demographers show that the wide geographic wedge from Koreatown to the edge of the Crenshaw area and across to the Westlake district near downtown houses more than 40 people per acre, nearly four times the citywide average. The people who live there are mostly poor. They are mostly new immigrants--primarily Korean and Central American--but also native-born Mexican Americans and African Americans.

At the heart of the area is 1,200-student Cahuenga Elementary School, near Western Avenue and 3rd Street, the only one in the district that turns away more students than it teaches.

“It’s very difficult for families to understand,” Cahuenga Principal Lloyd Houske said. “They see a neighborhood school and they think they’re going to go there. . . . Some families just can’t accept it--they keep coming back time after time to see if there’s space.”

The rules for getting into school seem simple: at the start of the school year, campuses accept new enrollees until they fill up. That means lots of seats for kindergartners who begin on time, fewer for children entering later in the year or in higher grades.

The rub is that new immigrants are the least likely to know those rules and the most likely to arrive in this country out of sync with academic calendars.

So for their children, taking the bus has become a way of life.

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Every day, Route 3571 pulls away from blocks clogged with the apartment buildings and divided houses where these children live and heads for the modest homes with neat lawns over the hill. But few of the children notice that transition. Most are too short to see out the windows.

On Route 3571 this morning, it is instantly evident that for younger children, riding inside this marigold metal hulk day after day bridges many differences. As they take their seats, the only clear segregation is by gender: boys sit with boys, girls with girls.

Asked if he will share his seat with a rider expected at the next school, Jose looks incredulous.

“She’s a girl,” he says.

Jose is a bus veteran. For three years he has been making the circuitous 19-mile trek to Short Avenue Elementary School just inland from Marina del Rey. He is the first pickup on Route 3571 and its last drop-off, riding 15 minutes longer each way than his peers, who disembark at Braddock Drive and Stoner Avenue schools.

Jose goes to Short because his mother wanted him to attend school with his older brother, Irwin. His brother went there because by the time the Delgado family arrived from Guatemala for Irwin to start first grade, they found themselves locked out of local schools.

Jose’s relative seniority on the bus has earned him an assigned seat--directly behind the bus driver--and the respect of his fellow travelers, who consider the backpack next to him an unspoken reservation for a special friend.

Through experience, Jose has learned to cope with motion sickness on the lurching and rocking bus--which he calls “when the bus gets dizzy”--by dozing.

And he watches the bus clock.

“It’s 7:23 already,” he cautions as the driver considers whether to pull away from a stop where no passengers are waiting.

Ridership on Route 3571 is down by half today from the maximum of three to a seat it sometimes hits, the result of several coinciding factors: flu season, the proximity of winter break and the fears of some parents after the accidental deaths a week earlier.

Statistically, the risk of riding the buses is minimal. The Dec. 6 fatalities, caused by a malfunctioning garbage truck whose hydraulic rod sliced into the bus, were the first in the district’s history. Although there have been thousands of fender-bender collisions in the last five years, few serious injuries have ever occurred.

“I can relate to the anxiety of other people putting their kids on a bus,” said school board President Mark Slavkin. “But they are safer there than any other way to get to school. . . . Certainly safer than being driven.”

Calls from anxious parents routinely flood the school transportation department’s nerve central: an Eastside warehouse where a dozen dispatchers are the vast system’s puppeteers.

During the morning and afternoon crunch, every phone is ringing with parents trying to find out why their children were left waiting at a bus stop or are late arriving home. Even when callers scream into the phone, the dispatchers respond calmly. Theirs is a calm borne of experience: All were once bus drivers.

“The bus was there two times already, did your kids leave the stop at any time?” dispatcher Joseph Patrick asks. Aside to a listener, he says, “They always give a song and a dance.”

Scolding completed, Patrick calls for a bus to return a third time.

From a parents’ perspective, putting a young child on a bus is the ultimate act of faith in the system--a system that immigrants do not necessarily know or trust.

Jose’s mother, Elida Delgado, says she “asks God to care for them every day on their journey” when her sons leave the apartment on Irwin’s bike; Irwin pedaling, Jose straddling the fender.

On the morning of the recent accident, she could not move from a television in the hotel where she works as a maid until she knew the gouged bus was not her son’s.

The accident brought back memories of a day five years ago when the bus carrying her older son crashed--a fact that she only learned after waiting more than an hour to pick him up at his bus stop.

She and the other worried mothers went into the nearest school and found no one who could speak Spanish. Slowly, though, they pieced together enough of the English explanation to understand that there had been an accident.

“We cried and cried and cried and cried,” she said. Then they rushed to the hospital. Students brought there had only bruises and scrapes, but Irwin was not among them; he was back at the bus stop, waiting worriedly for his mother.

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On the bus, children quickly develop three sets of friends: neighborhood friends, school friends and bus friends. They exchange telephone numbers, trade insults and dispatch advice with the familiarity of siblings.

“You better not be wearing that hat to school,” Antonio Enriquez, 8, teases one boy after the two board Route 3571 at Hobart Boulevard School. “They might think you a gangster and blow you away.”

In this commuter family scenario, the bus driver is the sole parent figure--part role model, part pal, part disciplinarian.

On Route 3571, this job is filled by Czech immigrant Jozef Janovsky, who has been driving a district bus for 17 years.

He begins his days at 4:30 a.m. at a San Fernando Valley bus yard--one of the district’s five giant bus lots.

“After so many years of driving,” Janovsky said, “I can recognize who’s bad kids and good kids from far away.”

In Jose, he sees a good kid. A kid with whom he can discuss football and ice hockey. A kid who first boarded the bus shy and knowing little English, but who now speaks English fluently and with far less accent than Janovsky.

“I remember him when he start,” Janovsky said. “He is smart now. . . . He was smart already, but he got smarter.”

The close relationship between drivers and their passengers builds a mutual trust that makes the long trips manageable. But the drivers must be ever-vigilant and for this they earn a maximum of $18 an hour.

Each develops particular ways of asserting their authority. Janovsky guides the rowdy group of 35, who get on at Hobart Boulevard School shortly before 7 a.m., into their seats--”sit here, sit here”--and then recites the rules:

“Good morning students. When the bus is moving, you stay inside your seat at all times. . . . You can talk to your friends, but no yelling.”

As he drives, he glances frequently in the bus-view mirror that spans half the windshield. When fourth-grader McAllen Jones slips out of his seat and crawls crocodile-style toward the rear of the bus, Janovsky spots him instantly and summons him back.

The point of entry for district drivers--whether employees of the district or of private bus contractors--is through 80 hours of specialized training. When they renew their state school bus driver’s certificates every four years, they attend an abbreviated version of the same course.

Behind the wheel they learn defensive driving techniques and how to inspect their buses daily. In a classroom, they learn the basics of bus etiquette and crowd control.

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But it is not always easy for a single bus driver, intent on navigating the city’s busy streets and freeways, to keep order among the children on board--some slowed by sleep, others so hyper they barely touch the seat.

At 7:45 a.m. aboard Route 3571, the fragile semi-peace begins to fracture.

“How long is it going to take us to get to Braddock Drive?” 7-year-old Ashida Jones shouts.

Across the aisle, second-grader Gabriel Enriquez starts pounding on his seatmate.

“Soon, soon,” Janovsky answers.

None too soon, the bus pulls up to Braddock Drive School to let off most of the students, then continues to adjacent Stoner Avenue School, where the last rider must be awakened.

Jose moves to the corner of his seat to see out the front window. He and Janovsky talk about hockey.

At 8:03 a.m., Jose bounds out of the bus at Short Elementary just in time to line up with his classmates. He has missed the morning’s free play period. Class is about to begin.

Minutes later, he is standing in Mrs. Stephens’ class with 27 other third-graders. None came from as far as Jose.

Hand over heart, he repeats with them, “I pledge allegiance, to the flag, of the United States of America . . . “

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Jose’s Route to School

Third-grader Jose Delgado is one of nearly 10,000 students who are bused each day in the Los Angeles Unified School District because their local schools are full. His 75-minute, one-way trip takes him from his neighborhood west of downtown to an elementary school near Marina del Rey, picking up dozens of other children along the way.

Route 3571

Pickups:

1) 6:48 a.m.: Berendo Middle School, pick up Jose

2) 6:59 a.m.: Hobart Blvd. Elementary, pick up 35 students

3) 7:14 a.m.: 36th Ave. Elementary, pick up 3 students

4) 7:23 a.m.: Hillcrest Drive Elementary, no passengers waiting

Arrivals:

5) 7:45 a.m.: Stoner Avenue Elementary, drop off 35 students

6) 7:49 a.m.: Braddock Drive Elementary, drop off 3 students

7) 8:03 a.m.: Short Ave. Elementary, drop off Jose