School bus rides may get longer for some students (in CA)
For more than 32 years, Patty Smrt has driven school buses along the steep and narrow roads of the Santa Cruz Mountains, picking up and delivering children to Loma Prieta Elementary and C.T. English Middle School.
But starting soon, state budget cuts threaten to do what neither the 1982 mud slides, the 1985 Lexington fire and the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake could do -- dramatically cut and perhaps stop the buses that carry half the 444 students to school.
Gov. Jerry Brown's midyear trigger cuts, effective this month, cost the Loma Prieta Joint Union School District $49,522, Interim Superintendent Patricia Lamson said. "This puts us into a major problem for the remainder of the year." And the district faces a bigger dilemma next school year, when Brown would end state subsidies of school buses.
Lamson was working on her holiday Monday to assemble scenarios for the school board to review Wednesday: cut buses somewhat, a lot, or not at all and thus sacrifice other programs.
The midyear transportation cuts struck hard at rural districts like Loma Prieta. The neighboring Lakeside Joint School District, further northwest in the Santa Cruz Mountains, also lost bus funding. That district has decided to keep all buses running for the rest of the school year and absorb the cuts, Superintendent Elizabeth Bozzo said.
full: http://www.mercurynews.com/rss/ci_19754978
Given the school bus crashes in China, I worry about children's safety with the longer rides.