.Stranded at the Bus Stop

Even as Oakland's schools have created more specialized campuses, their students have fewer ways to get to class.

Four years ago, Beatrice Kanwea escaped the bloodshed and turmoil of
her native Liberia. Nearly penniless, she and her family settled into a
tiny apartment in East Oakland, joining thousands of recently arrived
immigrant families who come to Oakland from every corner of the Earth.
So it was a godsend for the seventeen-year-old and her two sisters when
the school district started a small high school catering to teenage
immigrants with basic English skills and, often, little formal
educational background. But now the girls face a challenge that
bedevils all too many students at this and other Oakland campuses
— they can’t afford to get to school.

Located in Oakland’s Temescal district, at the former site of Carter
Middle School, Oakland International School opened its doors in fall of
2007, ushering in students from across the city, and allowing youths
like Beatrice to avoid their large and often rough neighborhood
schools. Last year, 17 percent of the school’s students were refugees,
and almost every student had come to America less than four years ago.
“They come with nothing,” says Oakland International School Principal
Carmelita Reyes.

But while the school is running smoothly and its attendance has
grown steadily, the seemingly straightforward issue of transporting
kids to its campus has become increasingly problematic. At first,
students were given free bus passes through a separate immigrant
services department at OUSD. But funding for that dried up, and
students had to start paying this fall. Now Beatrice and her sisters
struggle to pay for the bus they take to their school across the city.
“We don’t have the money to be paying for the bus everyday,” says
Beatrice, who is in her second year at the school.

Almost within earshot of the diesel engines of Berkeley’s free
yellow bus fleet, Oakland does not offer school transport to the vast
majority of its students. While a subsidized monthly student AC Transit
pass is only $15, International School attendees are some of the
district’s poorest students, from families making as little as $130
week, according to school records. Most students don’t live near school
or have access to cars. For some, putting up the bus fare every month
is a real struggle. A handful of kids have left the school or decided
not to enroll at all because they are simply unable to pay the bus
fare, Reyes said. Then they either go to their large neighborhood
school or, in some cases, don’t go to school at all.

Reyes describes being bombarded by requests for free passes from
students, 80 percent of whom ride the bus. “I’ve had parents call me
who want to send kids here but, without a pass, can’t afford it,” she
adds.

Under federal law, students who are legally homeless receive a free
pass. So to ensure their free ride to school this year, Reyes reported
some of her students as legally homeless because many live in
apartments with multiple other families. But proving this, and getting
kids to admit it, is a challenge.

With reported district-wide dropout rates just shy of 40 percent,
Oakland’s schools have long sought ways of getting and retaining kids
in class. Although giving them a free ticket to school wouldn’t
alleviate the problem, Reyes believes it would definitely be a positive
incentive. But paying for the passes would be far too much of a drain
on the school’s modest budget, Reyes said.

Although most of the district’s 46,000 students attend neighborhood
schools, a growing number attend one of the small citywide schools
offering specialized curriculum for students who might otherwise fall
through the cracks. The district even hosts annual options fairs for
kids entering high school, offering them a chance to choose schools
outside their neighborhoods that might offer a better academic fit.
This piggybacks on the federal No Child Left Behind Act, which
guarantees students the right to attend other schools if their local
school is not meeting performance standards. In Oakland, where
underperformance is the norm, thousands have this choice.

“The district has created options encouraging kids to look outside
of their neighborhood,” says Reyes, who noted how much money schools
lose when enrollment drops. “But then they’re not providing
transportation to get them there. So is it really an option?”

It wasn’t always like this. In August 2002, a year after Reyes
started teaching in Oakland, low-income students in middle and high
schools across the AC Transit service district were given free bus
passes, the result of a campaign waged by a coalition of advocacy
groups and public officials. But a financial shortfall in AC Transit’s
budget that year, coupled with a slew of bureaucratic entanglements,
forced the program’s early demise. By the fall of 2003, the free passes
were history.

“AC Transit was trying their best,” said Jeff Hobson, deputy
director of the Transportation and Land Use Coalition, an Oakland
nonprofit that was involved in the 2002 free bus pass campaign.
“There’s no real bad guy here. But pretty quickly it became clear that
the commitment was only going to pay for a portion of what advocates
were asking for and that there were a lot of administrative
difficulties in making it happen.”

Currently, OUSD only offers yellow bus service to its small
contingent of students who attend all-day special education programs.
Aside from that, it has a slim annual transportation budget of $50,000
from which it very selectively draws, providing free AC Transit bus
passes to students who are forced to attend schools outside their
neighborhoods either because their local schools are at maximum
capacity, or they were kicked out of them.

“If students want to go to school outside of their neighborhood,
mostly it’s on them,” explains Mike Bonino, an OUSD employee who
oversees the distribution of passes. He says it’s also a good learning
experience for kids to raise the requisite $15. “If I gave every
student a pass, we’d just blow our budget.”

Oakland is hardly alone. The majority of East Bay municipalities
served by AC Transit do not provide free bus service to their students,
many of whom are low-income. The only exceptions are a few wealthier
cities including Berkeley, which provides busing through fifth grade, a
direct result of the city’s higher property taxes.

Hobson dates the drastic reduction in yellow school bus service back
to Proposition 13, California’s 1978 landmark property tax reduction
initiative. Ever since, he says, schools throughout the state have had
a lot more trouble providing services like free transportation.
“Low-income communities don’t have as much ability to tax residents to
pay for services like this, and the school has to choose between paying
teachers, buying books, and running a transportation system,” he
said.

Recently, the issue got even more complicated, when the Federal
Transportation Administration threatened to clamp down on public bus
routes designed primarily to transport students to school. Federal
dollars, it argues, can’t be used to subsidize school bus routes
because it harms private bus companies’ ability to compete. Oakland has
many such routes, including the one bringing students from the
flatlands up to Skyline High School in the hills.

When accepting the principal job at Oakland International School,
Reyes knew there’d be no shortage of challenges, but has a difficult
time accepting this one. “I can’t believe in the USA we can’t figure
out a way to support students’ education by getting them to
school.”

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