A Long and Tiring Road to School

It’s still dark at 6:30 a.m. on the corner of 2nd Street and Hobart Boulevard, as 8-year-old Carlos Martinez waits for the bus that will take him to school. Cold bites at his neck as he waits, so he zips up his gray fleece sweater. His mother stands by with some hot atole, the sweet, frothy cornmeal drink that warms him up.

Hundreds of bleary-eyed children and their parents have already gathered at this Koreatown corner west of downtown Los Angeles.

“I wake up at 6 o’clock or 6:15 in the morning. Sometimes the alarm wakes me up, other times, my mom tickles me. I have to splash water on my face to wake up, or else I’m still sleepy,” said Carlos as he boarded the bus at 6:55 a.m. one recent morning.

About 1,900 students are bused to school from this block every day, more than from any other area of the city. They assemble in dozens of lines, transforming the site into a schoolkid’s Union Station, where more than 50 yellow buses stop every day.

Squeezed out of their overcrowded neighborhood school, Cahuenga Elementary, they are among the roughly 15,000 students in the sprawling Los Angeles Unified School District who have been forced to take long bus rides to find schools with space. The district has the second-largest school busing operation in the country, after New York’s.

For Carlos and about 150 other children at this Koreatown stop, the destination is Encino Elementary School, a 50-minute trek each way.

The trip can be an ordeal. It also clearly affects learning, according to school district officials, who say test scores of traveling students are typically lower than those of similar non-traveling students. The burden falls hardest on minority children in inner-city neighborhoods where enrollments are surging but few new schools have been built.

As enrollments increase and the crush of overcrowding continues, receiver schools such as Encino Elementary are reaching their limits. That means students living in densely populated urban areas will be required to travel even farther to learn.

“We’re facing these years of tremendous overcrowding. The issue is that the number of children bused is going to grow every year, with no relief in sight,” said Gordon Wohlers, the district’s associate superintendent of planning assessment and research. “We need to build schools.”

Until the district meets the challenge, Carlos continues the daily grind to Encino. Not because he likes the bus. But because, after more than four years of commuting to school, he knows no other way.

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Busing has spawned struggle and controversy in the Los Angeles district since 1978. Then, court-ordered busing for racial balance led many white parents to take children out of district schools and to launch a statewide initiative to ban forced busing.

After mandatory busing was outlawed in 1981, thousands of minority students continued to ride buses as part of a voluntary desegregation program, which eventually grew to more than 50,000 students. Busing to relieve overcrowded schools began in the late 1980s. It is now difficult to separate busing for desegregation from busing to relieve crowding because most minority students come from overcrowded schools.

But by contrast with middle-class white parents, who rose up to protest busing, the parents of today’s bus riders--most of them low-income, many of them single parents and few of whom speak fluent English--mostly have accepted their lot with resignation.

Sonia Salguero, whose son Edwin has been riding the bus with Carlos for the last three years, said most of the parents in the neighborhood are against busing. But they lack the time to form a protest group.

“I hate leaving my son in that line every day, all by himself to wait for the bus,” said Salguero, a housekeeper. “I think if we formed a group, the officials would listen. But it would take someone who knows English well and has the time to fight the issue.”

Beyond that, many parents say, although placing a child on a bus unleashes an agonizing day of hand-wringing and worry, it is also a trade-off that may be worth making.

“I worry about him. But I think he’s better off in Encino,” Corina Martinez said of her son, Carlos. “They’re strict with the homework. And they don’t have the same problems with gangs and drugs out there.”

Though most parents would agree that their children are getting a good education at Encino, there is a price to pay, said Lorraine Reisner, a teacher at the school. In the event of sickness or emergency, there are few options for getting children home. Students are sometimes left moaning in the nurse’s office, waiting for the afternoon bus.

“I’ve never had children come to me and complain about the bus. It’s just something they accept and do,” she said. “But you think, what happens in case of an emergency? What if we have an earthquake? For these parents, that’s a reality.” Moreover, because of work schedules or lack of transportation, many parents are not able to participate in parent-teacher conferences or other school activities.

Lloyd Houske, principal of Cahuenga Elementary School in Koreatown, believes some immigrant parents are intimidated by schools outside their neighborhood and avoid visits for fear of embarrassment.

“These parents don’t have much contact with the school. Some don’t even know where the school is. They just don’t have the same comfort as they would if the school was around the corner,” Houske said.

At Cahuenga, the most heartbreaking day of the year is enrollment day, when parents from the neighborhood camp outside in the hopes of getting their children admitted to a school close to home. Next year, Houske said, he expects such a huge crowd that he will set up portable toilets.

“They just don’t understand, Houske said. “They come into the office and ask, ‘Why? Why can’t we go to this school? We live here.’ ”

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Carlos has been riding the bus to school since kindergarten. For the first three years, he bused from his neighborhood to Bellevue Primary School in Silver Lake. Although it was a relatively short distance compared with Encino, his mother recalls that adjusting to the bus was difficult.

“Oh, in the beginning, he cried and cried. And, so did I,” said Corina Martinez, who walks her son to the bus stop every morning before going to work as a housekeeper.

“He eventually got used to it. He had to, because we really had no other choice. Esa es la vida,” she said. “That’s life.”

Carlos, a chatty fourth-grader, has been riding on Route 5275 to Encino for two years. He and his mother leave their apartment about 6:30 a.m. for a bus stop bustling with a mix of black, Mexican, Central American and Korean American kids.

The bus pulls up at 2nd Street about 6:45 a.m. Ana Sandoval, the driver, watches as Carlos and 34 other students file into their assigned seats. As the bus moves to its next stop at Alexandria Children’s Center, each seat begins to unfold its own drama. Some children cough or yawn. Others primp their ponytails and exchange gossip. Two little girls with hair still wet from the shower press their heads against the leather seats in front of them and go back to sleep.

In the seat across from Carlos, one kid looks around to see if the coast is clear. Then he reaches gingerly into his knapsack and slowly takes out a secret that he reveals as if it were a string of pearls. Mentos!

“We’re not allowed to eat on the bus,” Carlos explains when he sees the candy. “You have to hide it from Ms. Sandoval if you have snacks like that.”

Ask Carlos whether he enjoys taking the bus to school, and he can’t decide. He enjoys attending Encino School. On the other hand, he wouldn’t mind sleeping past 6 a.m., especially now that the mornings are getting colder.

Like many adults, what he hates most is traffic on the 101 freeway. One morning last week, Sandoval spent a few extra minutes waiting at Ramona School, the third and final stop before hitting the freeway. As they waited, Carlos started to fret over getting to school late.

“What’s she doing?” he asked aloud. “Why doesn’t she go? Let’s go!”

Aside from the hardship of early wake-up calls, many traveling students find it difficult to form lasting friendships with schoolmates because of the distance. Most of the 245 students bused to Encino, for example, had to miss the after-school Halloween carnival to catch the bus home.

Carlos explained that he has two types of friends: those from the bus and those from school.

“I like my friends from the bus better. With friends from school, you can’t play together much because you live in different areas. With my bus friends, I see them all the time,” he said.

Patricia Maldonado, an office assistant at Encino School who works with Spanish-speaking traveling students, said that often the anxiety of the bus trips takes its toll in other ways.

“It’s hard on the kids,” Maldonado said. “Last week, one student on the bus pooped in his pants. . . . Poor thing.”

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The combination of early morning hours, dead time spent on a bus in traffic, low rates of parental participation and stress are all reasons that a traveling student’s grades suffer, Wohlers said.

Across the district, reading scores on the statewide Stanford 9 test for first-graders ranked in the 42nd percentile. First-graders who travel on the bus scored, on average, in the 29th percentile.

“It’s not surprising,” Wohlers said. “When you think about all the hurdles that these families go through, day after day, year after year.”

The district projects that the number of children bused each year will peak in 2005. That projection is based on the assumption that some of the new schools the district is planning will be built and ready to open by then. The district’s school-building plans, however, have been chronically behind schedule.

Until then, the district has no choice but to add more buses. And Carlos will continue to ride them, despite the occasional hardships. One recent day, he woke to find a rainstorm pounding outside his door. As he walked to the bus stop, he slipped and fell into a puddle. His backpack was soaked and so was he. He started to worry that his books and all his homework were wet, too. Still sleepy and unable to compose himself, he sat in the rain and started to cry.

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Long Road to Learning

Because of overcrowding, about 15,000 students are bused daily in the Los Angeles school district. The 50-minute ride from Koreatown to Encino is among the most heavily used.