A late-arriving bus has yielded a breakthrough for Pinellas County's struggling school choice plan. Faced with the specter of hyperkinetic children and angry parents waiting at bus stops for late-starting schools in the fall, NAACP Legal Defense Fund attorney Enrique Escarraz has agreed to make a change. The choice transportation plan, he says, need not affect students at fundamental schools.
"If it's going to cause all elementary school kids to have to start at 10 in the morning, I'm not sure it's worth doing that," Escarraz said Thursday. "Besides not being good for kids, it raises further antagonism toward the whole plan."
The concession is small and only tangentially related to the choice plan that Escarraz negotiated as an end to court-ordered desegregation. But his words are significant because they signal a willingness to consider the impacts of choice as the plan takes effect - a flexibility that School Board attorney John Bowen has repeatedly claimed doesn't exist.
The Escarraz concession comes as board members are being treated to some wholly unappealing transportation options for the fall. To satisfy the new school assignments under choice, the district will have to bus nearly 70,000 students. Financially, the impact could not come at a worse time. Pinellas will be forced to take $7-million out of the classroom to pay for more buses at a time when the Legislature may cut $29-million from the budget.
And the money is only the beginning of the nightmare. Transportation director Terry Palmer is being asked to perform a miracle, to absorb 14,000 more bus riders without affecting how schools operate, and that just isn't possible. He has done a creditable job, but the impacts include: fewer bus stops, meaning children will walk farther to catch a bus; buses stopping at more than one school, meaning children face longer rides; and, most regrettably, a potentially dramatic rescheduling of school opening and closing times. Under various alternatives, high school students could start as early as 7:05 a.m. and middle school students could finish up as late as 5 p.m. As one board member observed: "What happened to our concern about how students learn?"
The busing schedules are only the latest choice complication. As the assignments for the first year are being completed, the district has faced angry parents whose kindergarten children are being turned away from neighborhood schools, overwhelming percentages of families that opted out of choice, application mishaps, and an ominous enrollment trend in schools in predominantly African-American neighborhoods. The basic concepts of choice were devised five years ago, in isolation from the families and schools and budgets it would affect, and the results so far are providing compelling evidence for change.
"We didn't know three or four years ago what we know now about how choice is going to impact kids," says board member Jane Gallucci. "Somewhere along the way, we've lost sight of our objectives. It's not about what we said three years ago; it's about sitting down right now and figuring out what's in the best interest of school kids."
Gallucci is right, and the encouraging news is that Escarraz himself may be seeing that.
