Students at Oak Park and River Forest High School who don’t have a ride to school will still have to rely on public transportation after School District 200 board officials unanimously voted to apply for a mass transit exemption waiver that will exclude the school from having its own dedicated bus service.
The state requires a school district to provide transportation for students who live 1.5 miles or more away from the school, but because there are other public alternatives for students to get to school, such as the CTA Green Line and Pace buses, the district qualifies for a mass transit exclusion, which they apply to renew annually.
But community members have expressed frustration with relying on the public transportation system.The Pace bus has long delays and cancellations which caused students to have missed time at school and other outside extracurricular activities, community members said.
OPRF parent Vanessa Izar-McFadden started a petition and gathered over 430 signatures calling for the district to reject the exclusion.
She said she started the petition this year because the Pace bus would be late picking up her daughter, a junior at OPRF, and sometimes it would miss her stop completely. Izar-McFadden’s son, who graduated last year, had been dealing with problems with the bus dating back to his freshman year of high school, too, she said.
When she started the petition, other people began sharing their bus issues online as well.
“The combination of having had that recent experience of my daughter waiting for the bus stop and it never came, and then talking to my neighbors, and seeing this thread, that was a sign I should start this petition,” she said.
She sent the petition to the School Board, and after tuning into the board meeting from home, she said she felt the board’s decision on Sept. 24 was “disappointing” even though they heard about community members’ struggles.
“I see this as a viable need, and I feel that it was dismissed,” she said.
“Students and families have experienced delays, long waits, cancellations, service disruptions and the famous ‘ghost buses’ that promise arrival but never appear,” a description on the petition read. “Routes can be canceled with little or no warning, and ‘ghost buses’ are regularly on the schedule. When this happens, students can be left waiting without a dependable way to get to school or get home, causing parents to scramble to secure rides for our children, including in inclement weather.”
Isabella Crowe, a student delegate and cross country athlete at OPRF said there have been several times where the Pace bus has caused her to be late to a match or she’s had to warm up on the bus because there isn’t enough time when she arrives.
“The bus system is just completely irregular even when we are using it for our transportation to sports games,” Crowe said. “As a cross country athlete, we are almost always late to races, even if we budget that time into when we’re arriving, it’s sometimes not possible.”
There have also been times when she said the bus caused her to be 40 minutes late to somewhere she could have walked in that amount of time.
During discussion of the issue at the Sept. 24 School Board meeting, Tony Arbogast, the school’s assistant superintendent for business services, confirmed that some students are missing the entire first period because of bus delays.
But, he said, operating school buses as an alternative. would be expensive. There are approximately 1,400 to 1,500 addresses situated 1.5 miles or more from the school. If the board were to reject the waiver and incorporate a bus service, they’d need about 40 to 60 buses, according to Arbogast.
That would cost a rough estimate of about $2.6 to $6 million to supply, but it could be more, officials said, a cost that isn’t in the scope of the budget for the next five years.
School Board secretary Jonathan Livingston said one solution would be students using bikes as another way to get to school, though Crowe said an issue that the school’s been having is bikes getting stolen. Her brother’s bike, which cost around $500, she said, was stolen while he was at school one day.
Driving to school is another alternative for students, though parking is limited, as the school does not have a student parking lot. Crowe said students park near her house and walk to school, which is about 10 minutes away on foot she said.
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“Through denying the bus system, it’s just a really scarce and unorganized system of transportation for students, which is inconvenient at the best of times,” Crowe said.
The board acknowledged the issues that students have faced with the public transportation systems.
Livingston said it would be much more cost effective “to use whatever political and relationship leverage that we have with Pace and regional and state leaders to try to elevate their performance on behalf of our kids.”
Board President Audrey Williams-Lee said the next step is to look at data of how students to get to school and how it’s working for them.
“I think there’s an opportunity for us to figure out what information can we get to understand where the biggest pain points are and then from there start thinking about what are some potential conflicts and solutions we can do that can make a difference,” she said.