Aliyya Swaby Photo
Earl Givan lives just ten minutes from the Sound School — but ends up spending a half hour to get there because he rides a CT Transit bus. Samuel Gray said he would probably do better academically at Sound if he didn’t have a 45-minute Metro North train ride every day to and from Old Saybrook.
The district does not pay to transport all high school students to and from school. Gray (pictured at top left) is one of many to New Haven high schools who wake up bleary-eyed hours before first period and climb onto public transportation to get to class.
Gray and classmate Givan (pictured top right) joined me on an episode of WNHH radio’s “In Transit” to discuss missing the bus or train, making transit backup plans and how a city bus is sometimes similar to a school bus.
Gray takes Metro North from Old Saybrook, then catches a school bus from Union Station to school.
Givan takes the CT Transit Z bus to and from Blake Street in Westville, which takes “a half hour even though I live 10 minutes away from school.” He takes the Z3 to school and the Z1 home. The bus route is slow with a lot of stops, he said. When he misses the bus, his parents drive him to school.
His CT Transit bus is full of other New Haven Public Schools students, who can be rowdy and loud. Once they tossed a discarded “half-eaten Eggo waffle” among one another around the bus. “Kids on the bus act as if it’s a school bus, but it’s not a school bus,” Givan said.
“If it gets too heavy, sometimes the bus drivers will pull over and throw everybody off the bus,” he said. “And then we have to walk to wherever we’re getting to.” Last semester, he and his peers were kicked off a bus three times.
Gray is late to school about half the time, since the bus from Union Station often does not show up. He then has a 20 to 30 minute walk to school, and regularly gets a late pass.
In the mornings, he finishes some of his homework on the Metro North.
The train schedule doesn’t work for him — often he finds himself with an hour or two of dead time waiting for a train to pull into the station on his way back home.
Listen to the students talk about the commutes beginning at 31:42 in the above audio file.
“As far as I know, I’m the furthest person away at least on the train line,” he said. “I absolutely think that affects me in school, me being more tired, I have to get up earlier than other people.”
He usually doesn’t get home until about 6:30 p.m. “That really doesn’t allow me to do much work. When I see other people doing a little bit better than me, I have remember that they’re 10 minutes away.”