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Kids Might Pay to Ride the Bus

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Times Staff Writers

More California students will be forced to pay for public transportation, carpool or walk to school next year because those yellow school buses won’t be stopping in their neighborhoods.

In response to the state’s budget crisis, some cash-starved school districts are scaling back on bus routes or eliminating rides altogether, while others are instituting or raising transportation fees.

School officials say cutting down on transportation costs helps save other popular programs, as well as jobs.

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“We’ve tried very hard to keep our cuts out of the classroom,” said Cindy Sabato, a spokeswoman for the 22,000-student Oceanside Unified School District in San Diego County, which recently eliminated busing for nearly 5,000 middle and high school students.

“We had to look somewhere and transportation is, unfortunately, not required by law,” she said. “So we decided to take that route, rather than raise class sizes to 30 or 40, or eliminate instrumental music classes.”

In Ventura County, some districts are considering implementing new bus fees or hiking existing ones. But school officials said they are waiting for the final state budget before making any major changes.

Officials in the Ventura Unified School District, for example, looked into creating a system where parents would pay $150 to $180 a year for each child to ride the bus, but are hoping to avoid such a tactic, said transportation manager Tony Briscoe.

“It’s still on the shelf, waiting to see what the governor does,” Briscoe said. “We do have some concerns, and we don’t want it to affect attendance. We don’t want to shoot ourselves in the foot.”

Fees considered too high will cause many students to avoid using school buses, said Gary Mortimer, assistant superintendent for business services in the Conejo Valley Unified School District. At the same time, the district faces an estimated 5% increase in the cost of transportation districtwide because of projected state cuts. The same is true in nearby Simi Valley.

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“It’s a real delicate balance out there,” Mortimer said.

Still, some parents worry that their children’s safety may be at risk if they can’t take a bus. And many students feel the change will be a big pain.

The 48,400-student Capistrano Unified School District in Orange County is considering getting rid of bus service for about 1,100 of the 1,800 high school students who ride daily, said David Smollar, a district spokesman.

Some of the remaining students have government-subsidized transportation because they live at Camp Pendleton. The rest attend Tesoro High School, which has no sidewalks along the three-mile stretch between the campus and the closest public bus stop.

Capistrano Valley High School sophomore Betta Pena, 15, and freshman Maricela Torres, 14, had to wait one day recently for a public bus to take them home to San Juan Capistrano because they had missed the school bus.

They winced at the thought of having to take the public bus every day.

“We usually have to wait for the first bus to go by anyway because it’s so packed already,” Pena shouted over the rush of cars behind her on Interstate 5. “It would take forever to catch the bus if there were hundreds more kids trying to get on the bus.”

Capistrano Valley High School student C.J. Steinfeld, 15, said he would have to bum rides from friends because his Mission Viejo house is a mile from the nearest public bus stop.

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His mother, Lynne Folks Steinfeld, said that ending bus service would harm the children who most need it.

“If you put that kind of obstacle in the way of getting to school, you’re going to lose some of the kids who most need to be there,” she said

In addition to possibly eliminating the high school routes, Smollar said, the district also may increase elementary and middle school bus fees, which run as high as $302 per student, or alter routes for the 11,400 students who rely on school bus transportation. Capistrano Unified has been charging students to ride the bus since 1992.

Audra Kephart, president of the Parent Teacher Assn. in the 26,000-student Vista Unified School District in San Diego County, said parents were outraged last year when board members voted to cut back on bus routes for a handful of elementary schools where most students live within a mile of campus. Parents staged a march and some took their children out of school in protest, she said.

“These kids were walking on streets that didn’t have sidewalks. They were walking over tracks. And some of the kids had two-parent working families and were actually walking to school alone -- elementary kids,” Kephart said.

The district, which is facing $9.5 million in state cuts out of a $190-million budget, is planning to eliminate middle school busing as well, Supt. Dave Cowles said. Nearly one-third of the district’s students are bused, he said, adding that the state has put him in a “terrible situation.”

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According to a study conducted by the California Assn. of School Transportation Officials, a nonprofit organization advocating child safety, more than 200 students statewide were killed from 1995 to 2001 while walking, driving or riding in cars en route to or from school, compared with just three who were killed in school bus accidents.

“School buses are by far the safest form of transport that can be used,” said Bob Austin of the state Department of Education’s Office of School Transportation.

Robin Leeds, a lobbyist for the National School Transportation Assn., said that “when we take kids off school buses and put them either in parent-driven cars, or worse, teenager-driven cars, we’re increasing the risk that they’re not going to make it to school.”

She added that 11 states, including California, do not require school districts to transport students, unless they are in special education programs.

“When schools are faced with a choice between school buses or teachers, or any other choice, very often it’s the school buses that go,” Leeds said.

Jim Ferraro, Southern California vice president for the bus firm Laidlaw Education Services, which operates nearly 3,500 buses serving nearly 40 area school districts, said schools already have trimmed field trips and bus rides for extracurricular activities. If they start chopping bus routes to and from school, he said, the company may be forced to lay off drivers.

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Ferraro said most of the districts that Laidlaw serves are considering cutting routes, except for Los Angeles Unified, which relies heavily on busing because of its magnet programs and problems with overcrowding that require students to travel long distances.

In Oceanside, where all students traditionally have been provided with free transportation, school board members agonized over the cuts, which saved $1.5 million, Sabato said.

“Many of our families are poor; many don’t have cars. Our board recognized early on that this would certainly create a level of hardship on our families,” she said. “However, we’re finding ourselves having to cut $16 million.”

The district may consider charging fees in the future, if parents and students support the idea, Sabato said.

The 22,000-student Palmdale School District also reduced bus service last year, ending transportation at some schools, rearranging routes and rezoning areas so that more students attend schools near their homes, said Sherilyn Thacker-Smith, director of transportation.

After the board approved the transportation cuts, which saved the district $857,000, parents began organizing carpools, while others paid their neighbors to walk students to school, she said.

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“It was a little bit of a culture shock, but once parents realized that, by doing that, we could keep programs going, like music and technology, they realized it was an action that needed to be done,” Thacker-Smith said.

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Times staff writers Jenifer Ragland and Gregory W. Griggs contributed to this report.

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