$180-a-Year Bus Fee Set for Pupils in ’98

Parents will have to pay $180 a year to have their child ride the bus to Placentia-Yorba Linda Unified School District schools starting in the 1998-99 school year.

District trustees voted Tuesday, 3 to 1, to revamp the district transportation system by charging a $1 per day busing fee and eliminating more than 80 bus stops.

Board President Karin M. Freeman was absent; Trustee Roseann Thorn cast the dissenting vote.

The district also reduced the bus-riding eligibility zones around each school to eliminate about about 40 middle and high school bus stops as of January and about 40 elementary stops as of September 1998.

Busing for special education students won’t change.

Nearly 700 of the district’s 3,500 students who ride buses to school will be affected, Steve Umber, director of transportation, said. Although trustees did not hear opposition to the fee, a few parents complained that their children will have to walk too far on busy roads because their bus stops were eliminated.

Dale Douglas said he is concerned that his daughters will have to cross two sets of railroad tracks and a busy intersection, walk on a street without sidewalks and hike up two hills to get to Bernardo Yorba Middle School.

Resident Karen Perry also spoke against having students walk that route to school. “It’s embarrassing that you would even think to ask children to do that,” she said.

District officials said the changes will relieve overcrowded buses and prevent the district from taking money away from educational programs to subsidize transportation.

“It either comes from the classrooms or the busing,” Trustee Craig Olson said.

Students who receive a free or reduced-price lunch will be eligible for a fee waiver.