EDGEWATER — More parents from Far North Side communities are speaking out after Chicago Public Schools' eliminated 270 bus stops citywide — including some that served students in the Edgewater, Rogers Park and West Ridge neighborhoods.
"It would be nice to be treated like a human by CPS," said parent Joan Shapiro Beigh. "It's just totally destroyed the ecosystem we had going."
Parents who spoke with DNAinfo said they immediately became concerned with the CPS decision to cut 13 stops from at least one bus route — forcing them at the end of the summer to make last-minute arrangements to get their kids to school.
Amy Zimmerman, a parent and attorney with Legal Council for Health Justice, said parents are worried about safety and the fact that their children have to travel significantly farther to stops, among other concerns. She says there have been several shootings in the area not far from where the children now have to walk.
The cash-strapped district announced it cut down its bus stops across the city down from 450 to 180 in late July, but refused to release the list of stops to the media, saying it was notifying school principals first. The move will save the district about $2.3 million overall, Ellinger said at the time.
At one stop in particular, Hayt Elementary in Edgewater, Beigh said nine students who attend magnet schools were reassigned to bus stops farther away — at Helen C. Peirce Elemenary and Eugene Field Elementary in Rogers Park.
The new stops are between 1-1.2 miles walking distance from the previous stop at Hayt. With the changes, affected students now walk from Rogers Park to Andersonville, about a 30-minute (or 1.3 mile) walk.
Many of the students utilize the bus stop as part of Route 3, which carries North Side students to the Lane Tech Academic Center.
Originally, students from across the city could be picked up at one of the 25 stops assigned to the school. But in an Aug. 17 email letter to parents, Cristen Lain, the academic center director, wrote that her school had been asked by CPS to cut back to 22 stops. Thirteen of the original stops were eliminated and replaced them 10 news ones.
All four of the stops in Edgewater, West Ridge and Rogers Park were eliminated, in addition to stops serving other routes, forcing students and parents to scramble at the last minute to make travel plans.
"It was just the utter shock at the complete decimation of route-serving Rogers Park and Edgewater," Zimmerman said. "There's no evidence presented that there was any thought put into why they cut out the schools they cut out."
Parents also took issue with the fact at least 6 of the eliminated 13 stops served five kids or more and were replaced with stops now used by as few as two students.
Parents complained about a lack of consultation with parents before the changes were made and difficulty in getting answers in CPS since the parents had a conference call in late August with Martin Ellinger, the CPS manager of student transportation routing.
Neither Ellinger nor CPS responded to multiple requests for comment from DNAinfo Chicago. Since the conference, the only other communication was a Sept. 23 email Zimmerman received from Les Kniskern, CPS' Network 2 family and community engagement manager, assuring her safety and security measures were still being assessed, parents said. Zimmerman said CPS promised an update by early October, but she hasn't heard from anyone since.
Loss Of A 'Mother Hen'
Parents and students haven't been the only ones affected by the decision to reconfigure routes.
Denise Shipp, a bus monitor at Hayt, first learned that the stop she worked for eight years was being eliminated from a parent before getting a letter post-marked Aug. 17 saying she should not report to her job on Sept. 1.
"That was something that I loved doing, that was something I enjoyed doing," Shipp said. "My heart was actually broken when they shut down that route. I was very upset at first. But then, like I said, things work out for the best."
Shipp was like a "mother hen" to students in the neighborhood, imparting lessons in kindness to kids and making parents feel safe knowing their children were in her watch.
Shipp has since taken a job within CPS working food service.
At the end of the day, parents said they feel slighted by their treatment from CPS, but acknowledge they must bear the consequences of the district's financial woes. They've since started complex pick-up and drop-off systems with other parents and also started using public transportation — something Beigh said she knew she'd have to do one day, but wished training her daughter to use public transit could be of her own timing and volition.
"It was like being hit with a cold glass of water in our face," Beigh said. "This was just kind of thrown at us."
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