No Money For Safety Busing

"I see that big old yellow school bus go by half empty, and my kids are standing out there waiting for a city bus. It looks ridiculous, but when I don't have forty cents for each of them, they can't go to school. Then people come and say they're going to take my kids away." This Ann Arbor mother is afraid for her children to walk to school. There are no sidewalks in her neighborhood, and they must walk on the shoulder of a heavily travelled road for over a mile. Yet these children are ineligible to ride a school bus because they live closer than Vi miles to their school and within the city limits. They must ride the city bus and pay the fare or walk the dangerous stretch of road. A member of the Ann Arbor Public Housing Tenants Organization (PHTO), the mother spoke to the Ann Arbor School Board recently to demand free school busing in her neighborhood and others like it- areas where there are concentrations of people unable to pay daily city bus fares for ach child. The PHTO's plea is the latest in a series of appeals to the School Board for busing assistance. The group is demanding free busing of at least 168 pupils in four basic areas: Maple-Liberty, Maple-Dexter, Hikone Drive and Green Road. The percendent to bus ■ children for economie reasons was set in November when I Arbor Park parents won their fight to obtain free school I busing for their elementary school children. Now the I PHTO is demanding equal treatment for their children. I But the School Board is unable to help them and the I many other parents who feel their children may not arrive safely at school. Caught in a financial bind and tied by state laws, the School Board can do nothing but I sympathize with distraught parents at th-is point. j "We've been very unhappy with the inequitable situation," said School Superintendent W. Scott Westerman. "It's unbelievable in this time. This is another I occasion in which the administration feels it is on the rack. There is no justice if there are any youths who cannot attend school. We recognize the legitmacy of these claims, but in reality we just don't have the money." j According to a state law designed solely to consolídate school districts, children who live less than Vi miles from school within the city limits are not eligibile for public f I school busing by the city. The state penalizes the city for carrying meligible I students by refusing reimbursements and assessing a I penalty fee of $8.00 per year for each ineligible child. The I average yearly cost per pupil for busing is $109, or 62 (over please)