Compromise unlikely in dispute over Sanger school buses. ‘There’s only so much we can do’

In late February, when Fresno County experienced some of its wettest days of the year, one of Stephanie Alvarado’s 15-year-old students arrived at Sanger High drenched from a long walk to school in the rain.

Teachers and staff gave the student gym clothes, socks and shoes while his clothes dried.

The student used to take the bus to school, but his bus stop was among those the Sanger Unified School District eliminated at the beginning of the school year.

Alvarado, a physical education teacher, said more students are missing school as a result of the changes.

“They’re messaging me, ‘I’m not going to be able to get to school today; I don’t have a ride,’” Alvarado said.

While union leaders say the district has averaged more than 100 tardies per day this school year due to the bus changes, administrators say tardiness has plummeted to its lowest levels in years.

“So we are not going to (subscribe) to the fact that the changing of the bus routes is leading to tardiness or additional absenteeism,” said Cary Catalano, the district’s spokesperson.

Teachers questioned how tardiness could drop so dramatically during a time when more students are walking to school because they no longer have bus transportation.

“I don’t know how they can say kids aren’t absent because of transportation,” Alvarado said.

For months, community members have attended school board meetings to urge the district to restore the bus stops.

Throughout the months-long debate, the district’s seven elected trustees have remained mostly silent.

Board President Ismael “Mike” Hernandez said the busing issue is important to him but referred all questions to Catalano.

Hernandez said it’s the board’s standing practice to let Catalano speak on behalf of the board.

‘It’s unfair to the children’

Florinda Rodríguez said she had to quit her normal field work job in August and September to get her kids to and from Jefferson Elementary after their bus stop was eliminated.

“We’re going (to meetings) because we want the bus to be brought back,” Rodríguez said in Spanish in a mid-November interview with The Bee.

Working a minimum wage job, single parent Elizabeth Rodríguez said she can’t afford to pay someone to transport her four elementary- and middle-school aged children to school on the days she works.

“It’s unfair to the children and the parents,” Rodríguez said in tears at a Feb. 28 meeting. “We have to go to work. It’s just me, by myself. I don’t have anybody else to help.”

The kids would normally catch the bus at a stop not far from their home.

“And you knew they were safe,” she said.

Without bus transportation, that’s no longer the case.

“You guys are making some of these kids not just walk in the rain but go through a gantlet of possibly getting jumped, robbed, yelled at from a car, even hit by a car,” said Rene Martinez, the California School Employees Association president for Sanger classified employees. Martinez said he has received phone calls about the cut bus stops for months.

Alvarado, who also leads the Sanger teachers union, said teachers are looking for ways to recover students’ learning loss because kids are either coming to school late or missing altogether because they don’t have a ride.

“Some of the results of not having that transportation are 100 to 150 kids late every day,” Martinez said.

Alvarado’s and many of her colleagues’ students have often been at least 30 minutes late for class.

“These kids, some of them, are walking over an hour to get to school,” she said.

Christianna Schiotis, a Sanger High senior, said she has seen her peers struggle to get to school, as well.

“Sometimes they’re late, and then they get detention,” she said. “There’s like this gap – they can’t get to school on time because of where they live. They’re upset.”

‘They’re not struggling to get to school’

But parents and teachers have yet to convince administrators or the school board, who have been largely skeptical of the claims of tardiness and absenteeism.

“It’s very easy to throw out artificial numbers without proof,” Catalono said. “We need proof of who these students are.”

Catalano said the district’s data paints a different picture than the one portrayed by parents and teachers.

Chief Operations Officer Ryan Kilby said cutting bus stops affected around 180 of the district’s roughly 13,000 students.

Overall attendance numbers remain within the 90th percentile, on par with the district’s historical averages.

Catalano also noted that tardiness reports plunged this year.

So far this school year, 1.25% of approximately 2,700 Sanger High students have been tardy to first period as of March 1.

That’s down from 4.63% in the 2021-22 school year as many students adjusted to being at school following the pandemic. In the 2019-20 school year, before schools closed due to the coronavirus, tardiness was at 2.92%. The year before in 2018-19, tardiness was at 3.35%.

Jefferson Elementary’s tardiness is lower than the rate it was this time last year. So far this school year, as of March 1, tardiness is at 1.65% for around 500 students. It was 2.08% in 2021-22, 1.2% in 2019-20 before school closures and 1.39% in 2018-19.

Superintendent Adela Jones said the data shows the lost bus stops haven’t created a student transportation crisis.

“They’re not struggling to get to school.”

And the bus changes, Catalano said, affected a relatively small number of Sanger families.

“We have not had 100 parents complain,” he said, noting the number Martinez used. “We have not had 100 parents independently come and speak to the board of trustees, saying, ‘We can’t get our students to school.’ We haven’t heard from 100 parents. We haven’t heard 100 concerns. To us, that could be legitimate thoughts and concerns, but we have not heard them and not seen them. They’re welcome to come to the board meeting.”

No more than five Jefferson Elementary parents have expressed concerns with complaints also stemming from Sanger High, Catalano said.

“It’s the same parents,” he said. “The reality is we have not seen a plethora of parents complaining, except for the few.”

In fact, Catalano said he believes some of the complaints are coming from people who may not have students in the district.

“We can’t have surrogates speak on behalf of people and not know who the people are,” he said.

But many of the affected families are primarily Spanish-speaking, and the district doesn’t regularly provide interpreters or translation services at board meeting for them to voice their concerns.

“We’re community members regardless that it may not be our kids affected – somebody’s kids are affected,” said Alvarado, the union president. “That doesn’t mean I don’t care that kids aren’t being bused to school and are having to walk in the rain, are being late or not even coming to school.”

Recent changes don’t fix the problems for older students

In an unrelated move, the Sanger Unified School Board voted last month to add bus service for about 600 students in fourth to sixth grade.

Providing additional access for those students, which comes through funding from California’s Transportation Reimbursement Program, won’t restore the stops cut at the beginning of the school year.

All the stops eliminated earlier this year were “courtesy” stops the district was never legally required to provide because they fell within the district’s established “non-transportation zone,” the distance a student must live from their school to qualify to ride the bus.

“We removed those stops that were clearly in the non-transportation zone,” Kilby said.

The sliding scale for the no-transport zone starts at half a mile away from school for kindergartners and gradually increases as the student gets older. High school students must live at least two miles away from their school to ride the bus.

As part of the state program, the district’s no-transport zones will be reduced for fourth-, fifth- and sixth-graders.

“With this improvement, we’re providing better transportation services to the target groups than any of our neighbors and many of the districts up and down the state of California,” Kilby said in March.

But the state program doesn’t address the issues older students are having getting to school.

“It looks good,” Martinez acknowledged, “but it’s not affecting everybody it needs to affect.”

While the access for 600 students will help families, it still leaves some households with children in multiple grades in the same predicament from the last few months: their kids having to walk or find a ride to school without bus transportation.

“It’s only for elementary,” parent MarÍa Gonzalez said about the change. Her fifth- and sixth-graders could benefit but she has seventh-, eighth- and 10th-graders who are within two miles from school and don’t qualify for busing.

Beronica Cortez has a high schooler and Justina Rosales – not including her elementary students – has seventh-, ninth- and 11th-graders who don’t qualify for busing.

‘There’s no finding compromise’

Both district officials and community members said they don’t expect the issue to go away.

District officials have explained their policy decision and why they won’t return busing within the no-transport zones.

“Until we give them what they want, there’s no finding compromise,” Catalano said. “We’ve had numerous meetings, and it still hasn’t eased the concern.”

Leadership has even considered reducing no-transport zones for all students, but such a move would increase the number of bus routes, buses and drivers, Jones said.

“If we can in the future, maybe the next thing we can do is reduce (the non-transportation zone) for the secondary (grades) by a quarter of a mile more,” Kilby said about the district’s goals. “To make it better and better and better.”

Abiding by the no-transport zones is consistent for all families, the district has said.

Those in the school community say it’s a question of equity and fairness.

“All students should have the ability to ride the bus if they need to,” said Schiotis, the Sanger High senior.

But as a growing district, Sanger Unified will struggle to meet all its students’ needs, Catalano said.

“We are trying our best to meet the needs as much as possible,” he said. “But I don’t think we’re going to make everybody 100% happy.

“There’s only so much we can do.”

The Bee’s Laura S. Diaz contributed to this report.

The Education Lab is a local journalism initiative that highlights education issues critical to the advancement of the San Joaquin Valley. It is funded by donors. Learn about The Bee’s Education Lab at its website.