Good-bye, 5 p.m. activity buses

CENTRAL VALLEY — Lorraine Loening knows she has to come up with a creative solution to the challenge of how her sons will get home from high school and middle school when the Monroe-Woodbury School District’s plan of suspending the 5 p.m. activity bus runs become effective next month.
Part of that plan will also be to reduce the 14 4 p.m. bus runs to 10 runs, Monday through Thursday.
Like last year, there will be no 4 p.m. bus runs on Friday. However, officials said on Wednesday morning the 4 p.m. departure time may be pushed up to as late as 4:20 p.m.
Still, Loening is not happy.
Her oldest son is a member of the varsity swim team, which practices at the middle school and finishes up late in the day. Her younger son is entering the middle school this fall and has expressed an interest in taking part in several different after-school programs.
In previous years, Loening’s older son took the 5 p.m. bus home. Parents like her knew both the 4 p.m. and 5 p.m. bus runs weren’t an identical match to children’s regular, assigned bus routes. But those buses would get them closer to their homes and kept parents from needing to pick up their kids themselves or find alternate transportation.
That was tremendously helpful to parents who worked and didn’t get back into the area until later in the evening or who didn’t have transportation to pick up their kids.

Word spreads

While district officials say the plan to “suspend” versus “eliminate” all 14 5 p.m. bus runs was part of the 2012-13 budget package put before voters in the spring, community awareness of the 5 p.m. suspensions — which in the past took students home after they were done with their extracurricular and sports programs or academic help — became intense last week.
It’s possible community reaction was tied into the recent assignments of bus runs and bus route consolidation. Word spread about those imminent changes, which included the suspension of the 5 p.m. buses. Even a Facebook campaign was launched to get the buses reinstated.
But it’s also a reaction tied into the reality facing parents in school districts statewide when they see programs or services they were a part of now cutback or eliminated.
“They (district officials) say they are preserving programs, but kids can’t get home from them,” Loening, a Monroe resident, said. “This is really, really horrendous.”

Sacrifice

While Monroe-Woodbury School District Superintendent Edward Mehrhof understands Loering’s concerns, he said the decision to suspend all 14 5 p.m. runs saves the district $250,000, which is part of a $1 million reduction in transportation costs reflected in the forthcoming school year budget.
That $250,000 covers personnel and fuel costs.
“We knew that if we wanted to avoid program cuts and layoffs and have the least impact for kids involved in clubs, sports and extra academic help, that we had to look at other areas (of the budget),” he said. “This impacts the fewest kids.”
Mehrhof said the transportation department’s review of 5 p.m. bus runs showed them to have particularly low ridership levels. And he stressed that the 4 p.m. bus run schedule is only minimally impacted, with review further showing there’s more than enough room on the 4 p.m. buses to accommodate students who previously took the later buses.
“The present economy has forced us to make very difficult decisions necessary to preserve our academic programs along with maintaining as many of our extracurricular activities as possible,” he wrote in a letter to district parents, posted on Monroe-Woodbury’s Web site, www.mw.k12.ny.us, this week. “The district’s primary goal is and has been, to ensure the academic excellence of our 7,500 students.”
In that letter, Mehrhof said officials had to “adjust the district’s programs and activities as equitably as possible” which will “require sacrifices so we can maintain our academic excellence and the faculty and staff so we can continue to prepare our children academically for the future.”
He added in his letter that the 5 p.m. bus suspension was “the lesser of all evils.”

Compromise

In a conversation with The Photo News, Mehrhof said only two out of 17 Orange County districts still provide 5 p.m. bus service, adding district officials discussed transportation department reductions during numerous public meetings in the spring.
“Perhaps some people didn’t understand it,” he said, adding in a district with approximately 16,000 parents, his office has received only eight telephone calls and four e-mails about this issue as of this past Tuesday. “But we had many public meetings. I don’t know I could have made it any clearer.”
Loening said she attended most of those public and board meetings, but had no recollection of any discussion of suspending the 5 p.m. buses.
“They talked about roofs, about boilers, about parking lots, but activity buses didn’t come up specifically,” she said. “I did not go to all of the meetings; perhaps they came up at others. The budget process needs to be more transparent. It’s going to make it impossible (to be at afterschool programs) unless my kid can stay there until 6:30 p.m., or they give parking permits to juniors.”
But she understood the district’s financial challenges.
“I totally get it,” Loening added. “My household income is down. I haven’t worked since last October. It just seems a compromise is better than eliminating them (buses).”
Mehrhof said he would be open to having 5 p.m. bus runs if money could be found to fund them, but he didn’t see that as an option in the short-term.
“I’d love to have a 5 p.m. bus,” he said. “But if I have to choose between an academic program or a sports program or a 5 p.m. bus, I’ll eliminate that 5 p.m. bus. I have to live within the budget.”
In his letter, Mehrhof said Monroe-Woodbury was “equally committed to restoring any service reductions that we have been forced to make during these difficult economy times. Please keep in mind that, had the money been available, the district would not have been forced to suspend the 5 p.m. bus run.”
That doesn’t help Loening and the other families who will be impacted by the change, although she felt possibility of the 4 p.m. buses leaving 20 minutes later may would be helpful.
“I’m not happy about it,” she added. “I’m going to do my best to make the situation work. If they are going to change the 4 p.m. bus to 4:20 p.m., that would be the compromise I wanted all along.”

By Nancy Kriz

Comments