Two weeks after drastically overhauling city school-bus routes, education officials admitted yesterday they still have no idea how many students lost service – and are revisiting two controversial rules that left kids waiting in the cold to get to school.
Speaking at a City Council hearing on the rerouting, Schools Chancellor Joel Klein said he is considering setting an age limit for students who are given MetroCards to get to school.
Klein, Deputy Mayor Dennis Walcott and Deputy Chancellor Kathleen Grimm also said the city Department of Education would scrap a longstanding policy requiring students to live within a quarter-mile of a school-bus stop to qualify for service.
The latter was an unenforced DOE policy for years, until bus routes were consolidated on Jan. 29 and thousands of students, some as young as 5, lost bus service or were offered MetroCards to replace it.
Klein, who mentioned the age restriction for MetroCards during nearly three hours of questioning, told reporters later that an age had not been settled upon and that a limit would not take effect before next school year.
In the meantime, he said, the department would continue to offer variances to youngsters whose yellow buses were replaced by public transportation on a case-by-case basis.
“I’m going to look at all the eligibility rules,” Klein said. “What we need to do, which has got to be done, is we’ve got to be sure we’ve got clear, consistent and effective rules for everyone and they’ve got to be applied equally.”
The changes to bus routes were put in place to save money. Officials, acting on the advice of pricey private consultants, claimed the city was paying for buses that were underused and that routes could be consolidated to save millions.
A total of 116 of 2,156 routes were eliminated for a projected annual savings of $12 million, or $5.6 million for the remaining fiscal year. The veracity of both figures has been questioned by various officials, and yesterday’s hearing was no different.
Still, Klein defended the changes yesterday. “I’ve already acknowledged that we could have done a much better job on this,” he said. “But that being said, it seems to me that the right thing for the city to continue to do is to look how to effectively ensure that we get it done.”
There was no shortage of criticism from council members, many of whom accused the city of trying to save chump change on the backs of kids. The pols claimed they had received more complaints from constituents on the issue than on any other matter.
“Parents believe this was the worst middle-of-winter decision since Napoleon invaded Russia,” said Councilman Peter Vallone Jr. (D-Queens).
Lawmakers asked how the department could claim it would save $5.6 million when it could not say with any accuracy how many students lost yellow-bus service.
Grimm testified that the department, in implementing the rerouting, underestimated the number of children who would be bounced from their buses because they were ineligible for service but had been taking buses anyway.
But, when asked for a specific figure, she said, “I don’t have that number.”
Her response drew fire from council members, who noted that before the plan was implemented, education officials talked of targeting phantom students and said nothing of denying yellow buses to students who previously had them.
“Based on what [you] have said, not all of the savings is due to waste,” said Councilman John Liu (D-Queens).
“In fact, a substantial amount of that is due to taking service away from families that have relied upon school-bus service,” he said. “To simply take it away, and in many cases not give the proper notification or even allowing parents to appeal, is coldhearted.”
The department has acknowledged alerting parents and bus companies of the changes less than a week before they took effect and tweaking routes at the 11th hour without informing parents.
Yesterday, Grimm said the software used to implement the changes could not ensure that siblings from the same household who attend the same school would be on the same bus.
In preparing for the route cuts, the department attempted to reach some 99,000 public- and parochial-school students to get them to register for yellow-bus service or discounted MetroCards.
Some 84,000 students responded, including 13,379 who requested yellow-bus service but were deemed ineligible under newly enforced eligibility requirements.
Yesterday, Walcott said: “Ineligible students should not be on buses, whether they were riding buses in the past or not.” He rebuffed calls to stop the new bus system as impractical.
Councilman Robert Jackson (D-Manhattan) fired back, “All you have to do is ask New Yorkers, ‘Should we implement this in the dead of the winter?’ “