Parents decry PW-S school busing changes

Parents on Monday blasted the Port Washington-Saukville School Board for a new busing system they said was sprung on them less than a month ago by a district that communicated the changes poorly, has been unresponsive to questions and concerns and has left some families scrambling to scrape together the money to pay for transportation to and from school.

With just a week before classes begin, they said they don’t know how or if their children will get to school.

“I just want to let you know that your school may start on Sept. 2, but Elizabeth will see you on Sept. 15 when we can finally afford to pay the busing,” Carrie Wichgers told the board, referring to her daughter, a freshman at Port Washington High School.

Parents whose children live less than two miles from school now must pay $500 a year for busing if they need it, and while Wichgers said she will eventually be able to make the payment, she won’t be able to do so by the Sept. 5 deadline set by the district.

“I’m a working parent. My husband works also. We live paycheck to paycheck and most parents I’m seeing on Facebook and the chats live paycheck to paycheck,” Wichgers, who lives on Summit Drive in Port, said. “You barely gave us any notice (of the busing changes) and now you’re barely giving us time to pay.

“The comments I’m seeing are parents saying they can’t afford this.”

Tory Meyer told the board she is in a dispute with the district over whether her family lives one-tenth of a mile too close to Thomas Jefferson Middle School to qualify for free busing and has been unable to get the answers she needs to figure out how her child will get to school next week.

“The rollout of the bus plan was very abrupt and very unclear, and even tonight it has changed,” she said. “School starts next week and I still don’t know how my kid is going to get to school.

“I still have questions that have not been answered. I’ve sent dozens of emails, made phone calls. At this point, I feel like I’m being ignored. “

The new busing system has put her in a situation where she may have to choose between getting her child to school and her job, Meyer said. 

“If you guys want to take my kid to school, please do,” she told the board. “At this point, my career is on the line.”

Kirsten Coenen’s children, who live on the west side of Port Washington and attend Saukville Elementary School, still qualify for free busing, but the children of many other parents don’t, and a botched rollout of the new system has infuriated them, she said. 

“I’m here to speak on behalf of parents who are not here tonight and who are enraged,” Coenen said. 

The district has squandered the public trust, she said, by introducing a poorly researched, poorly communicated plan a month before classes begin, then failing to help parents navigate the changes.

“You showed the entire community the district cannot communicate effectively about issues that affect time, money and, most importantly, trust,” Coenen said. “Parents are angry and now are scrutinizing every decision you make. Some are calling for dismissals.”

Meaghan Hoffmann said the first she heard of the changes was when she called Johnson School Bus Service, the district’s transportation provider, to sign her son up for bus service earlier this month. She said she registered her child, a third-grader at St. John XXIII Catholic School in Port Washington, for the paid busing option and was told everything was in order. But when she called the bus company Monday to find out where her son would be picked up, she was told his name was not on the School District’s list of children to be bused.

She noted classes at St. John XXIII were to begin Wednesday, Aug. 27.

“I called the district and left a message for a Mel today and did not receive a call back,” Hoffmann said, referring to Director of Business Services and Human Resources Mel Nettesheim. “I, too, have no idea how my son will get to school.”

Like many other parents, Hoffmann said, she and her husband work full time and rely on school bus service they are willing to pay for. 

“This really feels like we’re going back to a 1950s policy where the district feels that moms are at home and can do this,” she said. “Why was it never a consideration that this would hurt working parents, because that’s what this has done.”

In a presentation to the board prior to the comments from parents, Supt. Michael McMahon said concerns about inconsistencies and inequalities in busing and a transportation system that was difficult to navigate were among the first he heard from parents after taking the superintendent job last year.

“I quickly started to hear from parents about busing concerns,” he said. “I was hearing from parents a year ago saying they were calling Johnson Bus and were on hold for hours, that they weren’t able to connect to request busing.”

Under the new system, which is essentially a return to a district policy that reflects state law, the district will provide free busing for students who live two miles or more from the schools they attend and for students who live a shorter distance from school if their walking routes include so-called hazard zones — for instance, high traffic areas or areas that lack infrastructure like sidewalks.

Parents of children who live less than two miles from school have the option of paying $250 a semester for the so-called city bus option.

While much of that system has been on the books, it fell apart under the management of Johnson School Bus Service, which previously determined who qualified for free busing and was responsible for invoicing those parents who were supposed to pay for transportation, McMahon said. Since the pandemic, nearly every child who registered for busing, including some who lived only a block or two from school,  received it at no cost, he said.

Last school year, only 15 of the 783 children who were bused were identified as children whose parents should have been charged for transportation, and only the parents of five of those students paid for it, McMahon said. 

Noting that a single bus route costs $50,000 to run, he said, “Johnson Bus took a $48,000 hit on the city bus last year.”

This year, 859 students have registered for bus transportation, 124 of whom will pay for city bus service. Initially, the paid city bus was only an option for students who live between one and two miles from school, but the district opened it up to those who live less than a mile from school because of the timing of the changes and the fact Johnson School Bus Service has the capacity to accommodate them, McMahon said. 

The district, he said, worked for months with new managers at Johnson School Bus Service to streamline registration for parents with an online system.

It also refined school attendance boundaries, updated hazard zone maps and assumed responsibility for determining who qualifies for free busing and invoicing the parents of children who are served by the city bus.

The district informed parents of the busing changes in a back-to-school email on July 31 and gave them until Aug. 15 to register for busing, a deadline needed to allow Johnson Bus adequate time to plan routes.

“Students can be added (to bus routes), but what we can’t do is guarantee busing for students who didn’t register by Aug. 15  on the first day of school,” McMahon said.

The district would have preferred to inform parents months earlier but had to wait for information from Johnson Bus, he said.

“We recognize it was late in the summer and there were challenges for families,” he said. “We wish we could have had all of this done in March. We were certainly behind the eight-ball.”

Coenen called the rollout of the new busing system “completely unacceptable.”

“The email went out at 2:08 p.m. on a Thursday right before a three-day weekend for the administration,” she said. “Parents had over 60 hours to panic without answers.”

She said it took the district five days to add a bus FAQ page to its website to help address the confusion and faulted administrators for not including school groups like parent-teacher organizations in planning for the new system, noting those groups could have identified obvious problems before they caused panic among parents.

Coenen also criticized the district for not doing its due diligence by, for instance, contacting police departments to see if they had enough crossing guards to handle an increased number of students walking to school because of new busing rules.

She said the district also failed to consult the City of Port Washington and Village of Saukville before it finalized hazard zone maps that didn’t include clearly dangerous areas, adding that in many cases parents had to identify those areas, then appeal to the district to have them included on its maps. 

Wichgers told the board the timing of the changes and deadlines associated with them have put some parents in an impossible situation, adding that based on the experience of her older daughter she had a wonderful impression of the school system until she received a letter from the district on Aug. 22.

She said her younger daughter “is excited beyond all measures to start high school, but I cannot send her because the letter I received says, ‘Yes, you qualify for city busing but you must pay by next week.’ 

“I can’t.”

Meyer said the district owes parents an apology and asked board members to delay the new busing system.

“A great deal of suffering and loss of trust has happened here. We can’t have more of that in this district” she said.  “You admitted a lot of things didn’t happen in the timeframe they should have and now it’s all being pushed on parents, so please, let’s not start the school year this way.”

Hoffmann also asked school officials to delay the changes, but said she had no confidence that will happen.

“I know what I say won’t change your minds,” she said. “All I can do is use my vote the next time they (school board members) come up for election, and I would suggest any parents who want to run for the School Board use this as their platform.”