Parents express safety concerns after elimination of courtesy bus routes

BY JENNIFER CABRERA

GAINESVILLE, Fla. – At the January 16 Alachua County School Board meeting, Member Tina Certain asked district staff to reevaluate the decision to eliminate courtesy busing, and several members of the public also spoke about the issue, citing safety concerns with young children crossing major roads.

The change was announced on September 12, 2023, and was scheduled to take effect on January 8. Courtesy buses are those provided to students who live within two miles of their zoned school and are not ESE (Exceptional Student Education) students. About 1,200 students in the district received courtesy busing before the change.

The district replaced courtesy busing with a system for parents to request transportation if their student’s walk to school meets the state’s legal definition of a “hazardous walking condition.” 

Certain: “I think we need to look at the unintended consequences”

At the January 16 school board meeting, Certain said she had received a lot of emails and phone calls about the change in bus routes, and she asked Superintendent Shane Andrew “to reconsider that, given the fact that rezoning was stopped last week… I think we need to look at the unintended consequences that we’re having on students that live within the two miles, especially young students trying to get there.” She was specifically concerned about students from “marginalized populations… We’ve had a lot of people quoting MLK, leading up to the holiday, but school segregation, equitable school opportunities, funding, those are things that Dr. King fought for, as well, and I think us, as elected officials, we need to look at that.”

Certain continued, “We’re saying we’re committed to the success of every student, but when we start to allocate the resources… our students who need it the most seem to get left behind.”

“The first day of school all over again for transportation”

During the Chair’s report, Chair Diyonne McGraw asked Transportation Director Dontarrius Rowls for an update on what he called “transportation optimization”; Rowls said it had just taken effect that day, and “it absolutely was the first day of school all over again for transportation.” He said the district went from 110 routes down to 92, taking 18 buses off the road and thus requiring fewer drivers. 

McGraw asked Rowls to address the “misinformation that was out of Facebook,” and Rowls responded that the district is operating under state statutes and that parents could request transportation for hazardous walking conditions, but “there is a state checklist that we have to go through in order to meet those evaluation criteria.”

Parents speak out

During general public comment, a father of two children who go to Parker Elementary said he lives in the Porters neighborhood, 1.9 miles from the school. He said he filled out the application for a hazardous walking condition in October but never received a response. He said his children are 6 and 8 years old and have to cross NW 6th Street, NW 13th Street, and University Avenue. He added that just last year, his 6-year-old had to be met by a parent at the bus stop because the district would not allow him to walk home alone from the bus stop, but now he is expected to cross major roads by himself. He added that the same courtesy bus served the Porters Community Center, which “did not know that the bus was being canceled and had to scramble to get transportation for the kids in the aftercare program.”

Chanae Jackson added, “This father is fortunate they can be home in order to walk their kids to school and back. What about all the black parents that have to get up and go to work before the kids actually get there?” She said the issue was not “misinformation” and that she was working with Porters, Sunset Horizon, Irby, and Tiger Bay. Jackson said, “The misinformation is that… Shane Andrew is doing a good job.” She said other counties have removed magnet transportation “because they understood that magnet students have more of an ability to get to where they need… If it has to be that I gotta get back into that realm of organizing people and packing out these meetings, we absolutely will.”

Representatives from Horizon Sunset said their residents had filled out the Hazardous Walking Conditions form and had received no follow-up. One representative said he had gone in person to the Transportation Office and was told they planned to create another courtesy route off 5th Avenue, which is over a mile from Horizon Sunset. He said there were 13 students with disabilities in the complex who had been unable to get to school that day, and there are roughly 19 kindergartners who are expected to walk over a mile and a half to school, crossing NW 10th Street, NW 8th Avenue, and NW 13th Street. He said residents of Campus Walk and Georgetown have similar issues. 

A parent from Tiger Bay said the children in that area have to cross Hawthorne Road to get to their schools; she said there’s not even a crossing guard there, and she had seen children just running across Hawthorne Road. She also said she had received no response to her Hazardous Walking Conditions form. 

“Some of what we heard the other night wasn’t necessarily accurate”

The topic didn’t come up again at the January 16 meeting, but at a Special Meeting on January 19 (in which the board voted 4-1 to approve new employee contracts, with Certain voting against the raises because she hadn’t seen a “concrete budget or a viable plan for the proposed changes in the salary schedule… I can’t responsibly vote for a budget amendment that lacks a clear sustainable funding plan for both this year and the future”), Certain asked for an update on the transportation issue, and Andrew asked Chief of Operations Maria Eunice to address the issue, saying, “Some of what we heard the other night wasn’t necessarily accurate.”

Eunice said she and Dr. Rowls have “addressed… every single email that we received, and phone calls,” and “the transportation team is answering [the contact information forms] as quickly as they can.” She said district staff members have spoken to “each and every one” of the people who spoke at the school board meeting, although they were “still not able to accommodate some of the courtesy rides, but the majority of them we were able to accommodate.”

Parents are complaining on social media

Local parents posted yesterday on a Facebook group concerning school board issues, complaining that their children have been waiting up to an hour for the bus, both before and after school; two families reported that their children were late to school every day last week. Other parents complained that their children get home from school later now.