Busing plan set for return of grades 6-12
COTA passes are a temporary solution to help supplement city school district
“The fact that we’re transporting charter school kids and non-public school students, that puts a challenge for our students to be in school.” John Coneglio Columbus Education Association president
Columbus City Schools will soon be able to bring grades 6-12 back into the classroom after grappling with transportation issues.
The district will give all high school students free Central Ohio Transit Authority
bus passes as a temporary solution.
“This is supplemental transportation,” said Jeff Pullin, COTA spokesman. “We are not a primary source of transportation.”
The high school students will be able
to use the bus passes starting this month through August, he said.
“We’re not changing bus routes,” Pullin said. “This is designed to work with our existing system.”
To get to school in the morning, high school students will go to the COTA bus stop closest to their home and the bus will take them to the COTA stop closest to their school and vice versa for their trip home.
Most of Columbus schools are serviced by transit lines, Pullin said.
About 90% of the district’s high school students live within a half-mile walking distance of a COTA bus stop and 85% of the high school buildings are located within half-mile of a transit stop, he said.
The COTA bus passes won’t replace yellow-bus transportation, but will supplement it, Columbus City Schools Superintendent Talisa Dixon said last week.
The district is using federal grants to buy the passes, in partnership with COTA, she said in an update announcing the return of high school students to buildings. The purchase will cost $216,000 and was to be approved by the Columbus Board of Education Tuesday night.
Students in grades 6, 11 and 12, divided in two groups, will return on March 15 and March 18, according to an announcement from the district.
Meanwhile, students in grades 7, 8, 9 and 10 will return on March 22 and March 25.
When the transition is complete, all of the nearly 47,000 students who attend Columbus City Schools will be offered in-person classes two days a week.
COTA will able to see how many students are using the buses when the juniors and seniors go back to school and, if necessary, adjust the number of buses that run on the lines, Pullin said.
“If we start to see a fluctuation or a need for more, we can easily add those in as more students come back to school,” he said.
The district had previously cited the state’s requirement that it bus thousands of charter and private school students as the reason why it couldn’t bring back middle and high school students. In Ohio, state law requires public school districts provide transportation to all students living in their boundaries, even if they attend charter or private schools.
John Coneglio, president of Columbus Education Association, is glad grades 6-12 will be back in the classroom but thinks students will have issues navigating the COTA buses.
“The best-case scenario is Columbus City Schools students are on Columbus City Schools buses,” he said. “The fact that we’re transporting charter school kids and non-public school students, that puts a challenge for our students to be in school.”
During the 2019-20 school year, Columbus transported more than 42,000 students each day. About a third, or 13,000, weren’t enrolled in the district and attended either charter or private schools.
Columbus City Schools completed two “needs assessment,” which involved surveying families to see if they want to opt out of busing.
The assessments showed 1,288 district students opted out of transportation services for the remainder of the school year, Columbus City Schools spokesman Scott Wortman said in an email.
Heidi Bailes, the parent of a sophomore at Columbus Alternative High School, said she opted out of the transportation services to free up space for another student in the district.
The 47-year-old Clintonville resident likes the COTA bus pass option, but plans on driving her son to and from school when he returns to the classroom later this month.
“I knew the busing issue was the biggest obstacle (to get students back in the classroom),” she said.
The district’s team of bus drivers dwindled by 22% in the past year — from 765 drivers on about 700 routes in March 2020 to 596 drivers on 531 routes currently, said Steven Mcelroy, executive director of business and operations, during the February school board meeting. Some extra drivers are necessary to cover absences, he said.
Many bus drivers, especially those who are older and more at-risk for health complications, are choosing not to work to avoid exposure to COVID-19.
Suburban school districts have also had a hard time busing students during the pandemic.
Groveport Madison Schools went without buses for two weeks in November after an outbreak of COVID-19 among transportation staff. Bellefontaine City Schools, about 60 miles northwest of Columbus, suspended nine of its 12 bus routes in early October because of the virus but eventually found enough substitutes to operate most of them.
And because of the pandemic, Columbus school buses can only have one student per seat per COVID-19 protocols set by Columbus Public Health. Franklin County Public Health doesn’t have a limit on the specific number of students who can sit on a school bus seat but instead recommends 6 feet of social distancing and masking.
Columbus City Schools has already brought back preschool, grades K-5; select students in all grade levels with
“complex needs,” such as disabilities; and high school students in careertechnical education programs at Columbus Downtown High School and the Fort Hayes Career Center. Those nearly 24,000 students went back into the classroom on Feb. 1.
The district had created a new bus schedule when grades K-5 went to a hybrid model on Feb. 1 — meaning the drop-off and pick-up times changed for charter and private schools that rely on Columbus City School buses, district spokeswoman Jacqueline Bryant said in an email.
The change, however, has caused problems for South Columbus Preparatory Academy, a charter school in German Village.
Their school day ends at 3:15 p.m. but the bus now picks up those students at 2:15 p.m. — cutting into the school day.
“That’s an hour off of our school day,” Superintendent Chad Carr said.
Previously, the buses dropped South Columbus Preparatory Academy students off at about 7:40 a.m. and picked students up at 3:15 p.m. before Columbus City Schools switched to a hybrid model. Now, the bus drops students off at 7:15 a.m., a half hour before classes start, Carr said.
“We’ve been going for seven months,” he said. “Our parents have gotten in a routine that this is when we’re going to school and when we’re out school and you are telling us to change it.”
Students who ride the bus home from school at 2:15 p.m. can either jump online for remote learning or they can use enrichment packets to keep up with the work they miss in person, Carr said.
“We’re trying to work along with them,” he said. “What they are doing believe it or not is legal in a strange way.”
Dispatch reporter Alissa Widman Neese contributed to this report. mhenry@dispatch.com @megankhenry