With No Rides or Buses, Thousands Skip School

Some relied on parents and friends for rides to school. Others got up early and walked. But thousands of public school students affected by the MTA strike just stayed home Tuesday.

Many Los Angeles-area public high schools reported attendance was down by at least 10% as the labor dispute halted MTA buses and trains. Teachers and principals said they were worried that a long strike could create the same academic problems and course failures as were triggered by a monthlong transit work stoppage three years ago.

Robert Jones, a junior at Grover Cleveland High School in Reseda, paid a stranger $1 to drive him to campus Tuesday morning. He was planning to walk the half-hour home but was unsure how he would get back to classes today.

“The only way I have to get around is the bus,” he said. “It’s disturbing.”

Education officials and the MTA do not keep solid statistics on how many public school students rely on the public transit system to get to and from school. Each month, the MTA issues about 20,000 passes to K-12 students across Los Angeles County, at a $20 discount rate, but those can be used for trips outside of school. And the Los Angeles Unified School District provides free tokens and passes to a few thousand students who have transferred from their local schools.

Many students use public buses and trains only after school lets out, to get to jobs and activities and to get home when parents are unavailable to drive them.

Bryant Valdez, 14, was dropped off at Cleveland High on Tuesday morning by his mother. But at day’s end, the freshman joined about 50 students waiting outside the school, unsure of how to get home.

“I have to find a ride,” said Valdez, who lives in Panorama City, adding that he was considering walking to his mother’s workplace, a half-hour away. The strike, he said, “is a bad idea, because how am I going to get home?”

Allan Weiner, Cleveland’s principal, said that his 3,700-student school was missing 300 more students than usual on Tuesday.

He said the students who will be most affected by the strike are those who come from poor families without cars. Weiner said administrators had asked students over the intercom system on Tuesday to ask their families to give rides to friends who need them. But even that is difficult to ask, he said, because some families have two or three children who rely on MTA buses.

“It’s really beyond us now to help that many students,” he said. “It is going to have a tragic effect on the school and these kids’ education. No doubt about it.”

Weiner said that the bus strike in 2000 hurt many of his students academically. “Some kids missed 20 days. It was really devastating,” he said. “A lot of kids are going to end up simply failing the whole school year if it goes on for a long time. They’re like pawns.”

David Taylor, assistant principal at Fairfax High, said several hundred of the campus’ 2,593 students rely on public transportation to get to school, and that many of the public bus riders were absent Tuesday.

The school’s phone lines were flooded with calls from worried parents. “They’re concerned about how long this will last and how it’s going to affect” their children’s grades, Taylor said.

The Los Angeles school district’s own bus system is running and not involved in the MTA strike. School buses transport about 75,000 youngsters a day, in part to relieve school overcrowding and to respond to integration mandates. But students who are ineligible for those school buses rely on the MTA buses, officials said. Those youngsters could face walks of an hour or more.

At John Muir High School in Pasadena, where at least 40% of the school’s approximately 1,300 students rely on MTA transportation to get to or from school, Principal Melda Gaskins said that difference was noticeable.

“It’s kind of empty today,” she said as a bell rang and students streamed out of classrooms and onto the central courtyard. She said she was waiting for a formal head count of absences.

Gaskins and other principals added that such an attendance drop not only puts students at risk of falling behind, it also could limit the amount of money the school gets from the state. Those funds are determined by the number of students in attendance on an average day.

For Muir senior Anika Estes, 17, getting to school seemed easy. Her father dropped her off Tuesday morning as usual. But she relies on public transportation almost every day to get home, and on Tuesday, a neighbor picked her up for a hair appointment. Estes, who said that she is sympathetic to the strike because a cousin is an MTA driver, worried about what would happen if the strike dragged on.

“I don’t know,” she said about getting rides the rest of the week and beyond. “My neighbor has to work, and I don’t know if she’ll get off in time to take me.”