Orozco, a senior, used to take the school bus. Now, with Cabrillo Unified School District having cut bus service because of a budget crisis, Orozco is depending on SamTrans to get home to the El Granada Mobile Home Park.
On Thursday, Orozco was one of a group of eight or so kids who weren't able to get on the 17 bus, the Coastside shuttle - because it was too full.
 Students at Main and Kelly in Half Moon Bay crowd onto the Coastside shuttle. |
That didn't work.
"Yesterday we made it on, but we were right in the door," said 11th-grader Erika Meza. "It's kind of bad. People are sitting on top of other people."
"It's a bad situation," agreed Orozco. "I ran from the high school to catch this. I told him to get a bigger bus."
Graydon Simser, the director of Coastside Opportunity Center, which operates the Coastside shuttle, confirmed that drivers reported they had to leave passengers behind, but that a bigger bus is not an option since they have contracted with SamTrans for the smaller bus and that is what the drivers are licensed for.
"Nobody has come up with a solution yet," he said. "Everybody is doing their best."
The girls said they didn't know how they would get home and joked that the next day they would walk down to Moonridge, the first stop on the 12-seat bus, to get a spot.
The 17 shuttle is not the only one that is overloaded with school kids. Montara resident Donn Zaroski said that the 294, which runs along Highway 1, is also leaving children behind. His son, a student at Cunha Intermediate School, has been able to get on the bus, but other children weren't as lucky, Zaroski said.
"Poor planning is probably a polite way of putting this," he said. "More than anything I'm disappointed that smart people have done a dumb thing."
CUSD Superintendent John Bayless was hoping to tell parents that there would be some relief in the form of a corridor bus for Cunha. But Bayless got some more bad news about the state budget, and now says the money that an anonymous donor was going to give for the bus will instead go to keep small class sizes in the lower grades.
Payments from the state for things that school districts are mandated to do, such as creating manuals of school site rules and filling out crime reports, must be deferred until later, the superintendent said.
"You are required to do it now, but you don't get reimbursed by the state until later," Bayless said. "Our greatest fear is have to make more cuts if the state budgets doesn't get better. When they say they're going to defer payments to us, well, a large percentage of our budget is people, and I can't tell people 'Your paycheck is deferred.'"
Bayless suggested those students who aren't getting on SamTrans buses could try after-school activities.
"The Boys and Girls Club is at the high school and the middle school," he said. "Kids can go to tons of athletic programs or music programs and the library is open in afternoon. We're not saying that this is the best of all worlds, but there are alternatives."
Bayless said that, in general, the community has been very supportive.
"Parents are not happy about it, but they realize the situation and, like me, they'd rather have their child in a class of 20 than have busing," he said.
With a budget deficit of $5 million to $7 million, and cuts in routes, SamTrans is in no position to do anything, either, said Chuck Harvey, the Chief Operating Officer of SamTrans.
"We don't provide school service," Harvey said. "Under the law, we're specifically prohibited from doing that. The Cabrillo Unified School District decided to eliminate school buses and we don't have the resources out there to suddenly design new services," he said.
There is nothing he can do about the situation with the 17 bus, Harvey said.
"I don't have any large buses in my fleet that I can give them," he said. "We could certainly run more buses, but who's going to pay for it?
"Do I feel bad about it? Yes. I wish there was something I could do."
w