Express stops are a new system that has been introduced this year across CMS. They assign all magnet students a bus stop not within walking distance from their homes. For example, if you live near Beatties Ford, your stop won’t be near your house but at a public place, like West Charlotte High School or a public library. This idea was introduced with the intent to make transportation more efficient for CMS, but how does this affect thousands of kids in the county?
On one hand, this system would be ideal because the buses have one stop and one route to get to school, saving gas and reducing the need for a great number of drivers. However, every student is responsible for getting themselves to their new express stops, and many are not able to get there because their parents are working and they have no transportation. Some students in the IB program at North Meck (or any of its other magnet programs) had no way of getting to their express stops, and the only viable option seemed to be transferring to their homeschool and starting over. Many were forced to leave the school and attend their homeschool with no IB program available. This caused many issues: from having to adapt to changes at a new school to seeing a reduction in grade point average because standard classes are weighted differently. Furthermore, families were only informed of this change near the end of the summer, so families had little to no time to decide what to do. Many missed the first weeks of school trying to transfer or find a ride.
Along with that, many students have opted to carpool with peers to be able to get to their express stops. This seems fine, but in reality forces people to wake up earlier and change their sleep schedule according to the time their ride is available. Because of all the homework the IB curriculum has, students go to sleep late as it is, and waking up earlier affects their performance in school because they are physically and mentally exhausted from the lack of sleep.
Vanessa Santiago, a student at North Meck who has been assigned an express stop, said: “I understand they are trying to save money, but it is not convenient for families who have parents that work early and are unable to drive us to the stops… If we had access to transportation, we wouldn’t need a bus; we would just drive to school.“ She is one of the hundreds of IB students adversely affected by this change and admits that she has thought about transferring to her home school several times in the past two months.
One of the many reasons express stops were created was because the district lacked drivers; they lacked drivers because they are underpaid, and they were underpaid because the system lacked government funding. The average wage for a CMS bus driver is just $15.87 per hour with six-hour days, 13% below the national average for drivers.
Though it is easier said than done, schools need more money to work efficiently and serve students. This is not only CMS’ problem; it goes deeper than that. A bus driver, who requests to remain anonymous, commented: “The reality of it is, we are [under] staffed; there are simply not enough drivers for all the routes we have to take… there was no other option but to resort to express stops.”
It will be hard to adapt to this new system, and many students will continue to leave their magnet schools out of pure necessity. However, this seems to be a semi-permanent change, and students will be forced to continue to make sacrifices to pursue their education in magnet programs. 🆅