Early to ride
Parents/school system compromise on predawn bus pick-up times for specialty center students
By Richard Foster CONTRIBUTING WRITER

High school senior Sam Bousch got his driver's license this year to avoid having to catch the bus at 6 a.m.

Sometimes you can fight City Hall - or at least the school system - and win.

A coalition of Chesterfield parents did just that this semester. A few days before school began, Linda Meyerhoffer was shocked to find out the school bus pick-up time had been switched to 6 a.m. for her 15-year-old son, Britton Vermaaten, who attends the county's Center for Mathematics and Science at Clover Hill High School. The prior year, the bus pickup was at 6:50 a.m. School starts at 7:25 a.m.

"The children who go to these specialty schools already have a challenging schedule and a lot of homework and are encouraged to participate in extracurricular activities," Meyerhoffer says. "My child had to get up at 4:45 [a.m.] and had to be in bed by 9:30 every night, which was pretty much impossible."

Britton adds, "There were plenty of people sleeping on the bus."

Meyerhoffer called the school system's transportation department, but wasn't getting satisfying answers as to why the bus pick-up time was so early. And she also wasn't hearing that it could be changed.

So she and her husband, Steve, a Web developer for the Virginia Department of Transportation, started a Web site, chesterfieldbus.com, to organize parents who were upset about the early pick-up times. They quickly learned there were at least 100 other families negatively affected by the change in the school bus pick-up times for kids enrolled in specialty centers like the one at Clover Hill.

Gerald Bosch's son, Sam, a senior at Clover Hill's math and science specialty center, was also impacted. Like the Meyerhoffers and other families, the Bosch family began arranging transportation themselves so their son wouldn't have to catch the bus so early. Sam had been riding the bus because the Bosch family wanted to avoid the high cost of insuring a teen driver, but because of the time change, Sam ended up driving himself to school. "He had to get a job to pay for some of the car insurance," says Bosch, but it beat having to get up at 5 a.m. every morning to catch a 6 a.m. bus.

Ultimately, Superintendent Marcus Newsome ended up meeting with Meyerhoffer and other parents in her Chesterfield Bus Coalition. By the end of October, the school bus pick-up had been adjusted to 6:30 a.m. "Dr. Newsome was nothing but nice and considerate about the whole thing," Meyerhoffer says.

County schools spokesperson Debra Marlow chalks up the problem to a severe shortage of bus drivers at the beginning of the year that has since been ameliorated, as well as growth in specialty center enrollment. (Another specialty center devoted to health occupations opened at Cosby High School this year.) Overall, specialty center transportation is a balancing act, and the school system is continually reviewing it.

"We made improvements after school opened that significantly improved some students' runs while some others may have been made worse by only a few minutes. You might have improved one [student's ride] by 30 minutes, but you might have made somebody else's ride five minutes longer," says Marlow.

While parents say the 6:30 a.m. pick-up still isn't ideal, the coalition will settle for it this year, though they plan on pushing for a reassessment of bus routes and pick-up times next school year.

"We're so lucky to have some of the best schools in the country, and I think the specialty centers do an excellent job," says Bosch. "But if the transportation takes everybody an hour each way to get to school, a lot of people might not choose to use the specialty centers. We want to keep the program strong and not have the transportation undermine it."