JCPS bus rides: how to spend 30 days per year on a school bus
From Antoinette Kunz in the C-J...
You'd never know it from all the complaints, but Jefferson County's elementary students are spending less time, not more, on school buses this year, according to district statistics.
After you read the rest of this, you'll understand why that's a bad opening to this story. It's like doling out all kinds of damage-- and then reducing it a bit-- and noting that you're not complaining as much!
While the new student-assignment plan has pushed elementary school ridership to nearly 26,000 — up 5 percent from last year — more than half those students are riding the bus less than 30 minutes each way, district officials say.
So, almost half are riding at least 30 minutes. Is that good?
But with more parents complaining this year about long bus rides, Superintendent Sheldon Berman is planning transportation changes to ensure that no student next year will have to ride a bus for more than 75 minutes one way.
75 minutes!! One way?! Now, we're talking! Thanks, Dr. Berman! No more than 2.5 hours per day. That's 30 15-hour days per year, spent on a school bus.
District numbers show that 364 students have a bus ride longer than 75 minutes one way — 32 fewer than last year — but 1,476 ride the bus more than an hour to get to school.
Brutal! I wonder how old those kids are...
posted by Eric Schansberg @ 9:59 PM
1 Comments
1 Comments:
How can children be expected to perform in school when they have to spend 1 to 2.5 hours every day on a bus?
Anything over 1 hour is too much.
In my area, I see 6 year-old neighbors' kids getting off the bus close to 5 o'clock on weekdays - around the time my husband is getting home from work. I wonder what time they have to get up in the morning?
6:00AM?
Not to mention the fact that "behavior-wise", this is asking for trouble.
It's a sad irony for these children -- it would seem any supposed gains, hoped to have been made by all this bus(s)ing, have been wiped out by all that wasted time and the resultant increased stress to family schedule.
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