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Crown Heights parents continue fight for school bus service

San Diego Union-Tribune - 12/15/2019

Oceanside parents are keeping pressure on the school district to preserve a school bus line from the Crown Heights neighborhood to local schools, after the district announced plans to cancel the route.

The families have been protesting since September, after learning that Oceanside Unified School District plans to eliminate the route in the next school year.

Parents say their children need the bus route to safely get to schools two to three miles away, and believe the district is obligated to provide that service, after closing their local elementary campus a decade ago. Oceanside school officials say they can't afford to keep the line running, and argue that it doesn't make sense to maintain a single bus route, when other neighborhoods in the district face the same transportation concerns.

"This route will end following this school year," school district spokesman Matthew Jennings said in an e-mail. "We have worked compassionately to communicate with our families and the community through this process. We continue to call each family that rode the route last year to make sure they have accurate information and understand the options available to them."

The district has said that families affected by the busing change can switch to a closer campus, but about 75 percent of families plan to keep their children in the same school and work out alternate means of transportation, Jennings said.

The Crown Heights group is requesting that the district use school funding specifically dedicated to low-income students and English learners in order to fund the bus line, said Karen Plascencia, chairwoman of the Oceanside Human Rights Council.

The funds, called supplemental and concentration grants, are calculated based on the number of English learners, homeless and foster youth, and students eligible for free and reduced lunches, and are intended to provide extra resources for those students.

"We met with the district on that issue," said Plascencia, who has been helping organize families around the issue. "We now know that they get more funding for these kids."

Crown Heights families are also asking for a greater role in planning how that money is spent, and would like to name several parents to share a seat on the district's Local Control Advisory Plan Committee, which oversees spending priorities. Jennings said that in November Superintendent Julie Vitale invited parents to attend those meetings.

"A parent was able to attend the very next LCAP meeting and we will work with them if they need to rotate representatives," he said.

The parents learned last summer that the bus line they rely on would be discontinued after this school year. Oceanside Unified had closed the local campus, Ditmar Elementary, in 2009, and enrolled students from that school to neighboring campuses including South Oceanside Elementary, more than two miles away. The following year, it eliminated all school bus services in the district, save the Crown Heights route, and bus routes for special education students or those who live on the Marine Corps base at Camp Pendleton.

To keep that line running, the district arranged for public transportation through a memorandum of understanding with the city of Oceanside, which collected bus fees from parents and administered the bus program. Parents said they paid $30 to $50 per child each month for bus service, and were also required to sweep streets, clean public bathrooms at a neighborhood park, and attend monthly community meetings.

Since the district announced the elimination of the bus route, parents have questioned the conditions they were required to meet to use it. And more importantly for many of them, they have protested the district's plans to discontinue it. They will hold a public event on Jan. 11 at Cesar Chavez Park in Crown Heights to discuss the busing issue and make flyers and posters to call attention to it. Parents are also considering legal action if they can't reach an agreement with the district, Plascencia said.

"Right now, it's mobilizing community power," she said said. "There's no excuse for why these buses shouldn't be funded. There will definitely be an escalation of the organizing strategy that the parents have. They want to protest, they want to be more visible."

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