On 4th Street, It’s Neighbor Vs. Bus Stop

Students’ alleged shenanigans at a school bus stop in the Hill have one neighbor on edge — and seeking to get the bus to pick up kids elsewhere.

That neighbor is Thomasine ​“Thommye” Shaw, a homeowner at Howard Avenue and Fourth Street who spoke up at a recent Hill South Community Management Team meeting. Shaw has tended to a tidy front lawn, neatly planted garden and blue-shingled house for over 30 years. The school bus stop is right beside her place, where a tree-lined, mostly residential block runs up to New Light Holy Church.

Each morning between 7:30 and 8:30, yellow school buses operated by First Transit subsidiary First Student pull up to the stop, open their doors, and bring waiting students on board. One of them — the Number 8 — welcomes a group of Truman School students, completing the remaining mile to their middle school.

That’s the problem, Shaw said at the management team meeting. After the block comes alive with youngsters each morning and afternoon, she and Howard Avenue residents encounter extra litter and destroyed personal property.

It has become especially bad this year, Shaw said. Starting in January, several Truman School students waiting for the bus walked onto her property, kicked up the lawn, lingered on her porch, and rang the doorbell dozens of times, ​“trying to break it,” she said. One yanked branches from her star magnolia tree. When the students saw her taking pictures of them from a window — she submitted a number of cell phone images to the New Haven Police Department (NHPD) — they ran around the church across the street, trying to balance on its railings. When the church built a chain-link fence, students began hopping over that too.

If the bus stop stays where it is when a new school year starts in the fall, Shaw said, she worries the students will do further damage to her property. She recommended that the school system move the stop up a block and merge with it with one at Howard Avenue and Fifth Street that skirts Bayview Park. It’s a nice alternative to her yard, she said. 

“Tell me why we are not being protected in terms of our own property,” she said at the meeting. ​“They can walk one more block.”

“Moving their bus stop there would allow them to use some of their pent-up energy while they wait for the bus,” she added in an email following the meeting.

Logistics Of Moving A Stop

Moving a stop is easier said than done, said Teddi Barra, head of transportation at the New Haven Board of Education. First Student is a national company; it shuttles over 19,000 New Haven Public School students daily on a contractual basis. When Barra gets a request to move a stop — and she gets several every week, she said, mostly from neighbors and parents concerned about private property or children’s safety on busy roads — she does a site visit during busing hours, and talks to students who are waiting.

After hearing Shaw speak in mid-May, Barra followed up at the stop in question. She has a protocol. She asks students what schools they attend. (The students, in this case, were polite, she recalled — ​“all of them said, ​‘Yes, ma’am.’”) If there are repeated complaints, she calls principals and asks them to talk to the kids and their parents. From that point on, the course of action is the principal’s responsibility. The principal can choose to hold a meeting with the students, send a letter home with families, or revoke bus privileges for a few days.

“It’s a balancing act,” Barra said in an interview.

“They are your neighbors,” she said she tells the students. ​“They live here.”

Truman School Principal Kathleen Mattern did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Barra does occasionally find herself calling First Student and reworking a route — particularly if road safety is involved. But she said moving a stop is tricky, because she doesn’t want to create a critical mass of students at any single stop. If one stop disappears, the one before or after it suddenly finds itself with close to 18 or 20 students boarding the bus at the same time. She and First Student have devised routes based on traffic flow, safety in crossing a street, and overall safety of a neighborhood. Changing them creates new concerns for neighborhood kids and their families, she said.

In January, Shaw called a complaint into police and filed a report with them. A neighbor who asked not to be named, in turn, called in a complaint that Shaw was being too rough with neighborhood kids. (Shaw admits to taking one kid by the collar, but refutes a claim that she dragged him off her property.) ​“By the way she was screaming, you would have thought he chopped down that whole tree,” the neighbor said.

The police have no way of tracking the number of school bus-related property complaints, said police spokesman Officer David Hartman. (Lt. Jason Minardi, district commander for that neighborhood, referred questions to Hartman.) Nor do they have a specific protocol in place for shenanigans that may happen at bus stops. He said that usually these types of crimes fall under ​“criminal mischief.”

In this case, the kid (who maintains his innocence, and hasn’t messed with the tree since) is 11 years old, and the police are working to mediate the situation, said Shaw, who gave details of the report to the Independent. 

“If the solution is some sort of engagement with kids in schools rather than a criminal charge so be it,” said Hartman by phone Thursday. ​“But crimes are crimes; it doesn’t matter who commits them.”

This past recent Wednesday morning, it was nearly silent at the bus stop as students chatted quietly on the sides of the street. No one crossed into Shaw’s yard. A few students held umbrellas up against an intermittent, warm drizzle; others let it fall on their faces as they looked down the street, from where the bus was supposed to come barreling any minute. At the corner, students Janeece Harrison, Brianna Wilson, and Darrien Wilson huddled in a semicircle, talking among themselves.

They remember watching a student take a branch off of Shaw’s magnolia tree, they said when asked. They said they haven’t ventured over to that side of the street, and most of their peers are too worried about consequences with the police — or with Shaw — to do so. But they can also understand why it happened, they said: because kids get bored when they’re waiting.

Still, the three said they’re not interested in making any enemies where they wait in the mornings. Asked if it would make a difference to walk to Howard and Fifth, students also shook their heads. They said they liked the stop right where it is.