Wheels & Heels: Fixing Buses and Breakfast

Nothing riles people up quite as much as when you monkey with their daily routine.

Decatur School Superintendent Phyllis Edwards touched off a this week proposing to lengthen the school day by moving school times earlier. Her reasoning for lengthening the school day is sound: having a longer school day means more time to teach students.

But I suspect part of the fury comes from parents who are already frustrated by a current school bus schedule that is not designed around the needs of most parents, but is designed to get a small number of children to school in time to eat breakfast.

In Decatur, according to the city school nutrition department, an average of 547 students ate a school breakfast in February, almost 70 percent of whom were getting their morning meal at a free or reduced price. According to City Schools of Decatur Transportation Director Simone Elder, the schedule is designed to get students to school at least 20 minutes before school starts to allow them time to eat a breakfast provided by the school cafeteria.

So that means that each day, another 270 children ride the bus and get to school at least 20 minutes early and sit around in the gym because they don't eat breakfast there.

But, a lot of parents find the current bus schedule inconvenient, which puts many extra cars on the road in the morning dropping kids off.  And that's not the safest or most ecologically friendly way to get children to school.

When Decatur resident Kris Carter looked into the bus schedule for her Glennwood child—she has three kids in three schools for the next 10 years -- the bus came down her street at around 6:40 a.m., even though the school doesn’t start until 8 a.m.  

“I want my son to eat breakfast at home, sleep a little later and be home as long as possible, rather than sitting at school an extra several hours,” explained Carter. When she or her husband travel, they get a neighbor to help.

Rob Pope, who ran a strong campaign for school board – losing by a couple dozen votes – puts his middle school child on the bus to Renfroe.

“The bus for Renfroe is a long ride, but it gets him out of the house at just about the same time as I need to leave to get to work and my wife needs to leave to walk our daughter to Clairemont,” said Pope.

Buses to Clairemont and Glennwood, for another child, didn’t work for his family, living on the northern edge of the city.

“These bus routes are just way too long for children of that age and generally inconvenient time wise,” opined Pope. “I hope the bus routes to the new [Fifth Avenue Academy] are separated from the K-3 routes or they will be too long and inconvenient for many families.”

According to a letter from Dr. Edwards, there will be no transfer point in the fall.

Kristin Miller, the parent of three sons in fifth, third and Pre-K,  thinks the school bus schedules are “ridiculous.” Her fifth grader gets on a bus at 6:52 a.m., arriving to school about 40 minutes later to get to school for band practice. Her third grader walks a block to Clairemont.

But her youngest son would have to ride a bus to Glennwood, then switch buses to go to College Heights, about 45 minutes to an hour bus ride each way for a 4-year-old. And the route is the same in the afternoon.

“That’s two hours of travel time per day for a 4-year-old -- in a city of four square miles!  So we don't use the bus,” explained Miller. “But there are others who don't have a choice, and it is unfair to those children.”

She added: “I have begged everyone I can think of to come up with a better bus plan for the Pre-K kids, to no avail. I do not understand how the school board and superintendent can think it is a good idea to put all the Pre-K classes in the same building on the far south side of town and then not provide appropriate bus service.”

Miller fears the situation will worsen next year, when the new Fifth Avenue Academy is on the southern end of time.

 “I know the school system is facing financial struggles,” said Miller. “But I also think that when decision-makers decide to create schools with small age groupings and put them in inconvenient locations, they have an obligation to provide appropriate bus service to their students.  Forcing parents to drive their kids to school is also an environmental disaster in a town that prides itself on being progressive."

The Decatur school system pays about $700,000 per year to DeKalb County to provide 14 buses that serve about 850 students daily, 277 of whom attend Glennwood, out of a total school enrollment of 2,900. Some of those expenses are due to certain federal requirements.

For instance, due to the laws mandating a free and appropriate education for special education students, Decatur buses transport one student each day to a school in Roswell, Elder said.

Another federal law aimed at helping homeless students requires that the school system transport transient students from wherever they live to Decatur, which means Decatur school buses are transporting students to Decatur from Atlanta, Stone Mountain and South DeKalb.

Having smaller buses wouldn’t make the system more efficient, Elder said, because larger buses are needed for athletic events. Decatur, as a matter of policy, doesn’t transport students who live within a mile of their school, unless there are safety concerns. With many busy streets in our city, that affects many students.

While I'm not one to let kids go hungry, I’d like to think that we could figure out a way to accommodate the breakfast needs of children and the rest of the chool system. Perhaps we could provide a “breakfast bus,” for students eating breakfast. Would that unfairly stigmatize students eating breakfast? Not necessarily—some children do pay for breakfast.

The school breakfast program is federally funded and it helps support the cafeteria. But I can’t help but think we could save a lot of tax dollars by providing some financial incentive to needy parents to feed their children at home. Maybe give them a stipend to buy cereal and milk for their children.

Parents who take responsibility for sharing a morning meal with their children might also ask about their schoolwork. Don’t we think that needy parents would rather spend time with their children at mealtimes if they could?