[P]arents and students in Winooski say it’s hard to get to class on time in a city without school bus service.
Parents and Youth for Change, a group of Winooski parents, students and community members, met with school officials and others this week to discuss the possibility of providing busing to the district.
For children in the remaining 30 percent of households, getting to school each day can be an ordeal. Winooski High School student Bishnu Khatiwada described her daily walk to school as cold, unpleasant and dispiriting.
“It makes it hard to be excited to go to school in the morning,” she said Friday. “On Halloween this year, I was going to school and I fell down because the road was so icy.”
Parents for Change has been running a listening campaign consisting of one-on-one conversations, focus groups, house meetings and Friday night dinners in order to find and resolve issues in the Winooski area for about two years. Community organizer Infinite Culcleasure said that the lack of school transportation is a recurring complaint among participants in these conversations.
Many of those people attended Wednesday’s meeting at the O’Brien Center. “It was great,” Culcleasure said. “Standing room only.”
Debbie Ingram, executive director of Vermont Interfaith Action, described the meeting as a success. A number of the community leaders, including district Superintendent Sean McMannon, pledged their support for the project, Ingram said.
But McMannon wasn’t sure a busing system was necessary, or even feasible. “There’s not enough information available to form an opinion yet,” he said Friday.
McMannon said he supported the parents’ initiative in investigating the transportation problem, but said the group still had a way to go before the district could implement a school busing system.
“The next step is to convene a working group that can further study and research this issue. Their charge is really to develop multiple options,” he said.
Culcleasure said the parent group is exploring a number of existing public transportation models in the hopes of adapting one to work for Winooski schools.
“In Vermont, we have the Vermont Public Transportation Association van rides, the long established College Street Shuttle in Burlington, and the newer Tilley Drive Shuttle. Across the country there are multiple examples of private investment in new bus routes and partnerships between local businesses, colleges and hospitals,” he said in an email.
Though he acknowledged that the project was in a nascent stage, Culcleasure said he is optimistic about the project’s likelihood for success.
“(Wednesday) was the very first time that all of the decision-making stakeholders in the room went public about their commitments moving forward with getting kids in Winooski to school safe, on time and ready to learn,” he said. “From some of the research we’ve been exposed to, we’ve learned that there are alternative small-city transportation models being implemented, both around the country and in Vermont, to look at. Then it becomes a matter of piecing together the funding.”
Officials from the Chittenden County Transportation Authority and the Chittenden County Regional Planning Commission also attended Wednesday’s forum.
