Two representatives from the Greater Dayton Regional Transit Authority attended the meeting on Thursday but said they were there to listen, not make comments.
Brandi Richardson, who has two children in Dayton Public Schools, said she attended the meeting because she is worried about her older daughter, who is about to head into high school.
Even before 18-year-old Alfred Hale, a Paul Laurence Dunbar High School student was shot and killed near the downtown Dayton bus hub on April 4, Richardson said she did not want her daughter anywhere near the bus hub. A 23-year-old man has been arrested in relation to Hale’s death.
“There has to be more parent involvement,” Richardson said. “It’s a lot of things, a lot of factors.”
Some of the suggestions from parents for bus changes included:
- “Straight line” busing, where all students in a neighborhood are bused to non-downtown Dayton hubs and then taken to school.
- Buying more buses and trying to hire more drivers to fill those buses;.
- Moving the bus hub away from downtown and adding more paraprofessionals or security officers to buses.
However, some of those proposals would be impractical, Dayton Public Schools employees said.
Jones said it costs about $3.9 million to purchase bus passes at $80 per person for DPS high school students to get to school.
To transport all of those high school students plus the charter and private high school students they would legally be required to offer the same services to, Jones said the district would need to purchase 73 buses for about $150,000 each, totaling about $11 million. Those buses would not arrive for 18 to 24 months, and the district would still have to find 73 bus drivers when DPS and many other schools are struggling to find drivers.
Another suggestion, busing students to neighborhood hubs, worried some of the bus drivers in the room, who said there are kids who run away from caretakers and could get lost at a hub. A hub could also cause confusion about which bus the kid is supposed to be on, causing a kid to go to the wrong school.
“Some of these things are really complex,” Jones said. “Some things you only see if you drive.”
Bringing drivers’ ed back into schools was another suggestion, something that DPS officials, including Jones and superintendent David Lawrence, have discussed in the past and an idea backed by Ohio governor Mike DeWine. Jones said the district is hoping to bring that back into schools in the next year.
However, not all students have access to cars.
Jones said the district has not made any decisions and will continue to gather data and hold conversations.
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