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Date: 12/5/2023
HOLYOKE — A joint meeting between the School Committee and the City Council on Nov. 27 discussed the ongoing bus services issue for the Lyman Terrace neighborhood. The neighborhood lost the bus services it had been receiving for 20 years after the district’s school rezoning process.
The filed item for the joint committee meeting asked the City Council to work with the mayor and school superintendent to address the reinstatement of bus services for Lyman Terrace students in getting to Kelly School as soon as possible, as a matter of public safety.
Students have been impacted by a change in radius deciding on who is eligible for busing to school, as many in the city had to switch schools due to the rezoning process. The guidelines say the district is only offering transportation services to students living outside of a certain radius of the school which has created a gray area, ,Concerned parents of the Lyman Terrace neighborhood feel their children should have the transportation that has been there for two decades.
Since the start of the school year, the district has made efforts to assist families in getting students to school and the issue was brought before the joint meeting in the hopes of reaching a resolution before the winter months.
The joint bodies opened the discussion by reading a letter from Mayor Joshua Garcia regarding the bus services of Lyman Terrace students that clarified a few points regarding the situation and provided two potential options to resolve the issue.
The first point Garcia made was that no money out of the district’s transportation budget was reallocated, and the budget included funding for 22 large buses and 27 minibuses, which is the same number of buses that were on the road in the previous fiscal years.
However, Garcia’s letter further pointed out, as part of the district’s rezoning process, boundaries were redrawn and students were reassigned, applying the existing transportation policy to the new boundaries, which includes a review of hazard zones across the city.
“Some schools got more buses and others got fewer depending on the number of students eligible for transportation living outside of the mileage thresholds in accordance with the existing policy,” Garcia explained in the letter. “For example, all elementary students that used to walk so Sullivan now get bused to McMahon because Sullivan is now only educating grades 6-8. Funds were not reallocated but used to be able to provide transportation for all students eligible in these new boundaries.”
Garcia presented two funding strategies in the letter for the council and School Committee to review and discuss as they try and meet the needs of the community.
“These strategies include making sure we are consistent with offering the same level of service for other parts of the city with similar challenges. For example, Lawrence School, which is serving our most disenfranchised population, has 87% of their students not eligible for transportation compared to Kelly School’s 70%. Lawrence School only has one bus for students that are eligible. If we were to continue offering bus services for Lyman, I need to make sure we are being fair and consistent for other neighborhoods. Not being consistent with the policy can open us up to further liability.”
Garcia explained adding one bus for the entire school year would cost an additional $73,000 in the budget. The Lyman Terrance neighborhood has 35 students living in that neighborhood which is .7 miles from Kelly school. Additionally, there are 60 other students that live even further away from Kelly that are between .71 and .99 miles from the school.
“If we wanted to bus all students in that area between 0.71 and 0.99 miles that go to Kelly School this would require an additional two big buses which would be $146,000 for the year just for Lyman Terrace. Many families expressed the winter months being a challenge so I had Superintendent Soto run the numbers for two additional buses for only the months of December through March and this would amount to $57,500 just for Lyman Terrace,” Garcia explained.
The letter closed with Garcia reiterated he was not interested in supporting a practice outside of the policy just for one neighborhood and if a change were to be made, it would be made fair across the city. Similar student data was reviewed for other schools in the district to see who was between 0.7 and 0.99 miles away from their school and it showed that one more bus would also need to be added at each of EN White, Lawrence, Holyoke STEM and McMahon schools. This would be a total of six additional buses.
The first option presented for the year would amount to $437,000, while the second option would be just for the winter months and cost $172,000.
When opened to discussion, Superintendent Anthony Soto added to Garcia’s letter that the district has been utilizing a “walking school bus” where some families of Kelly school have been taking advantage of in order to help safely transport students to school. The “walking school bus” is a group of students walking to school with one or more adults and in this case it’s about a 10-minute walk from the neighborhood to the school.
Soto said city departments like the DPW and Fire Department have assisted in making sure the walk is as safe as possible for students involved and have assisted in crosswalk work and repainting of crosswalks. He added three to six staff members of Kelly School have been assisting in the walking school bus and that about two to five students on average have been taking advantage of the program since it started.
Soto said the current busing policy was put in place before his tenure began and that with its specifics and the district rezoning, efforts were made to be transparent through the entire process. This involved sending letters to every Holyoke student family explaining the process, if a child was eligible for transportation in accordance with the existing policy in place.
At-large City Councilor Tessa Murphy-Romboletti asked Soto what is anticipated for the coming winter months and what happens with the walking school bus option, as well as if there is any impact to attendance rates for the Lyman Terrace students that correspond with the ongoing busing issue.
Soto said he did not have the specific numbers with him but that Kelly school’s overall attendance rate as of date for the year is 92%. He added the walking school bus will continue through the winter months. He cited his time working in Springfield where they found no correlation between attendance of walkers and attendance of those who took the bus to school.
“I can tell you from experience, I lived on Pine Street and when I went to Dean, if I missed the bus, then I wasn’t going to school. But if I was a walker and I was consistently walking to school, my mom wouldn’t have let me use that as an excuse because I can’t go back and say, ‘mom, I missed the bus,” Soto said of his personal experience.
Ward 1 Councilor Jenny Rivera said she felt the issue was that this specific neighborhood had bus services for 20 years until this year, and even though they were informed by the district of the rezoning process, it did not seem to make sense why it was now gone.
Rivera added she was informed the bus situation would not be changed for the neighborhood and reiterated that message to families in Lyman Terrace before the school year, something she apologized for as she did not intent to pass along misinformation.
She also added concerns about the safety of the walk from the neighborhood to the school, even with the district making it a safer route, due to speeding drivers and potential icy sidewalks during the winter.
At-large Councilor Israel Rivera said he wouldn’t look at just Lyman Terrace but also a general radius of the neighborhood to see if any other students were now missing bus services as it can be a big impact on a family to just lose services after having always had it for the same school. He also said while he doesn’t think parents would let their kindergarten or younger child walk to school alone, he does feel that some of the older elementary school students may be left with that option.
“The bus is a luxury and it is a privilege, but it’s an experience for kids that is irreplaceable. It would have been weird for me to not have that experience,” Rivera said. “At the end of the day, attendance is impacted.”
At-Large School Committee member Erin Brunelle pointed out that in order to choose one of these options, the City Council would need to address it through their meeting, as they control the transportation budget of the district.
The discussion will eventually move back to the City Council who will make a vote on one of the two options presented by the mayor.