School Bus Rerouting Causes Chaos

Jennifer Cruz-Chilel burst into tears Wednesday as she walked out of the elevator at the school district’s headquarters.

She joined dozens of exasperated parents crashing 54 Meadow St. as they learned about last-minute changes to bus routes when school opens Thursday — changes that confused and left them concerned about being able to get their kids to school.

In a sweeping overhaul of New Haven’s school-bus routes that could save hundreds of thousands of dollars, the district’s transportation department had reversed the door-to-door pickup she’d arranged for her fourth-grade daughter. She said her daughter’s asthma and club foot would have made it hard to walk four blocks each morning for the ride to Benjamin Jepson Elementary School.

The transportation department promised her it will put the accommodation back in place, but it would take at least a week. Cruz-Chilel said she didn’t know what to do. She has to work, and the child’s grandmother has to walk around with an oxygen tank.

“It’s ridiculous; they need to do something.” she said. ​“This has been in place since last year.”

Cruz-Chilel and other parents waited for hours to bring up health and safety issues with new stops, to register address changes, or sometimes, just find out where to drop their kids off.

Parents didn’t find out about their new school-bus route until this week, just a few days before school started. That means the scope of the problem may be even bigger than the dozens who streamed in to Meadow Street on Wednesday, as even more haven’t been jamming the phone lines and flooding inboxes with their concerns.

School officials did not respond to an emailed request for comment on how routes were set, why parents were notified so late, and what they can do to ask for changes.

(UPDATED: After this story was published, the district released a two-page statement, in which district administrators said they ​“sincerely apologize for the confusion and anxiety the changes to our bus transportation system have caused our families.” They said the new policy is that bus stops may be within half a mile from a student’s home. They added that students must walk all the way to school if they live within half a mile for Grades K‑8 and one-and-a-half miles for Grades 9 – 12.)

In February, Superintendent Carol Birks said that the district could save up to $2 million by tasking the new transportation director, Fred Till, with eliminating bus routes. But when it became clear to parents what that would mean, just a day before school starts, it led to chaos at the district’s headquarters. Security guards kept watch, as dozens of parents crowded into a second-floor conference room and waited for their number to be called.

At this time of year, annoyance with school-bus routes is just as common as back-to-school shopping. But administrators from other departments said they’d never seen it be as chaotic as this week’s frustrations. They stepped in to help out. In the early afternoon, administrators finally set up different queues for each issue, which allowed some parents to get out faster.

One of those parents was Phoenix Rumley, whose granddaughter is starting at Elm City Montessori School. She just needed to make the drop-off the same as the pick-up, instead of at an after-school program. She said she was able to get out in 45 minutes; she handed her ticket to another parent who was more than 40 deep in the queue.

Other issues took far longer to resolve, and the outcry about them is only growing. A parent-generated petition started yesterday calling on the Board of Education to undo the rerouting. The petition already has 450 signatures.

One mom said she’d been at Central Office for four hours. ​“Malo” (bad), she said in Spanish.

“A nightmare,” said another, who was shaking as she walked to the parking lot. She said she’d missed half a day of work because she never received the blue postcard with her child’s stop and couldn’t get anyone to look it up for her. She said she doesn’t mind that the new stop on the way to Wilbur Cross High School is a block farther, but she said she’s furious at the district’s process.

“There’s got to be a better way,” she said.

One said she’d have time to write a book, get an advance and move out of town before her number was called. She said she wishes that the district had reached out to parents to ask for help in identifying bus stops or even taking shifts as monitors. ​“I’m so disappointed,” she said.

Several of the parents who showed up said their kids have medical problems that won’t work with the new routes.

Allison Youripoma, another fourth-grader at Jepson, said she has asthma that makes it hard to breathe when it’s cold outside.

In the past, she has missed two or three days of school whenever she has an attack. She said that had led the school’s leadership to threaten to kick her out. Her new bus stop is six blocks away from her house.

The transportation department told her mom it needs the school to register her disability with a 504 plan (a form of government documentation) to make the change.

58 Calls, No Response

On Wednesday afternoon, the district sent out an email telling parents that administrators are reviewing their requests to move bus stops. The email said the district is aiming to get through the backlog by Friday, Sept. 6, a week and a half away.

“We are aware of your concerns about the changes in bus stops. These changes were made to shorten bus route times and promote student health,” the email read. ​“We will review and make adjustments on a case-by-case basis.”

The email said to call the district’s Transportation Department at 475 – 220-1600.

Staffers from other departments within Central Office said that they’d given up phone lines to handle the call volume. But when this reporter called twice over a 15-minute period on Wednesday afternoon, the line beeped with a busy signal.

Alyssa Cocce, an Ansonia parent whose daughter attends Engineering & Science University Magnet School, said she called six times on Monday, 19 times on Tuesday, and 58 times on Wednesday without being able to speak to anyone about arranging a safer pickup spot than the three-way intersection the district picked.

The email said parents could also ask for a change request form at their child’s school.

The district posted the same message on Facebook, where more than 115 parents wrote in about their problems within the first two hours it was up.

Around 12:30 p.m., Nijija-Ife Waters, the City-Wide Parent Team president, arrived at 54 Meadow St. to speak to parents. She told them that the district is eliminating bus stops to save money.

“It wasn’t something that Central Office just decided to do,” she told two moms. ​“We are in a deficit. The decision that was made was not made because they just don’t care about parents.”

(Waters claimed that the idea had come from the Budget Mitigation Committee, an advisory panel. ​“The reforms were in progress before we convened,” said Jill Kelly, the committee’s co-chair, adding that the committee had only asked the district to look into starting a campaign to let parents know they can opt out of putting their kids on the bus.)

Some parents said the savings aren’t worth it, arguing that they’d rather know their kids are safe than have more teachers in the classroom.

Ana Correa, whose 9‑year-old daughter will attend Betsy Ross Arts Magnet School, said she didn’t want her daughter walking to Davenport Avenue. She came to Meadow Street on Wednesday to ask for permission to drop her daughter off at a friend’s daycare center about a mile away.

“What happens if something happens to her? I’m going to be worrying at work,” Correa said. ​“Upstairs, they said they want all kids together to save on gas money. But how can we get all the kids safely there? It’s safe at the bus stop, but not on the way.”

What if that meant an extra teacher or librarian at her daughter’s school? ​“It doesn’t make sense for me,” Correa said. ​“In this school, you’ve already got teachers. But what happens outside? The kids need safety, inside and outside.”