04 December 2007

Yellow Bus Service

The Cincinnati Enquirer had an article yesterday highlighting the fact that CPS has been cutting some students from their bus lists. Most of the students attend smaller parochial or charter schools, and State Law allows them to deem some transportation requests as unreasonable.

Long gone are the days when a bus circled neighborhood and took all the kids to the local school. These days we have district-wide magnet programs (and the district is huge) and all sorts of private, parochial and charter programs. It is getting more complicated to get all these kids to school. Somedays while waiting for our bus, we will be passed by 6 or 7 other buses picking up kids to go to other schools.

This is our second year using the yellow bus service, but this year we only use it in the morning, as it doesn't usually fit with our afternoon juggle. And next year, we likely won't be using it at all because or youngest hopefully will be in a pre-school for 4 year olds, and the yellow bus does not serve kids that young.

My complaints with the yellow bus is two-fold. First, the bus driver cannot seem to get there at the same time every morning. I hate standing out in the cold or rain, a block from home, wondering if the bus has already passed. If the regular driver is sick, the bus can run very late, and may even come down a different direction or miss us entirely. It seems that with mobile phone ubiquity and computer technology that the location of the bus or estimated arrival time could somehow be easily monitored. I'm sure something like this will be commonplace someday. Secondly, some of the drivers are questionable. We had a problem last year with the bus driver playing innapropriate music. This year, we have a different driver, and the bus is quiet inside.

1 comment:

Kevin LeMaster said...

And why must buses stop at every single kid's house? When I was a kid, they let off several of us at one place and I had to walk a quarter of a mile. (Uphill, both ways!)