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Oceanside school bus program had little oversight from district, city

San Diego Union-Tribune - 9/29/2019

Sep. 29--When their neighborhood school closed down more than a decade ago, parents from Oceanside'sCrown Heights neighborhood were desperate to maintain a bus route that kept their children from walking miles on streets marked by gang violence and dangerous traffic.

So they agreed to pay a monthly fee to help fund the service.

What they didn't expect was a demand that they also sweep streets, attend mandatory community meetings and clean offices and bathrooms to earn discounts on those fees.

The arrangement came to light last month when parents showed up at a board meeting to protest a decision by the Oceanside Unified School District to cut the route. What emerged from their stories was not only a picture of the bus route's importance to their families, but an account of a transportation program administered with little oversight and unorthodox and ill-advised conditions.

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As parents fight to preserve the bus transportation, they're also questioning irregularities in how the program was run over the years. While the school district provided the buses and drivers, a local community group, and later the city, collected fees for the service.

The fees varied from year to year without explanation, from about $30 to $50 parents said. At some point, the bus program became enmeshed with other community initiatives, and parents were told they must log hours in neighborhood cleanups or other janitorial tasks in order to receive lower rates for bus service.

Both city and school district officials acknowledged that it was improper to require labor in exchange for a public service, but said they weren't responsible for overseeing the details of the program.

Karen Plascencia, chairwoman of the nonprofit Oceanside Human Rights Council, which has worked to organize residents on the issue, said those explanations don't bear scrutiny. She thinks there was not only mismanagement of the program, but also discrimination against the low-income, largely Hispanic community.

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"I think it was taking advantage of the fact that these people don't know their rights," said said. "Saying that in order to receive public transportation, you have to attend monthly meetings, you have to clean restrooms and sweep streets. It's completely illegal. It's not access to public education, if you have to exchange labor for your kid to receive safe transportation to school."

Margaret Dalton, a vice dean and professor of education law at the University of San Diego, said the practice appears improper on the face of it.

"It strikes me as outrageous to expect parents to do community services of the type your taking about, which is work that public servants should be doing," she said.

The bus route began after the district closed Ditmar Elementary School in 2008 and students transferred to neighboring schools including South Oceanside Elementary or Lincoln Middle School, 2.5 to 3 miles away. For parents with early morning jobs, or without cars, that distance posed an obstacle to getting their children safely to school.

"As it is, school starts at 7 a.m. in the morning, and it's an hour walk to get there," said Jessica Mora, who rode the bus to middle school when the program started, and whose younger sister now rides the same route. "As a way to get there, you have to cross Coast Highway, cross over the freeway. It's extremely dark, and there are a lot of homeless people."

The parents had cause to worry. The Crown Heights neighborhood, bounded by Mission Avenue to the north, Interstate 5 to the east, Missouri Street to the south and Horne Street to the west, has seen tragedies including fatal traffic accidents, drug dealing and gang shootings.

In hopes of making their neighborhood safer and cleaner, residents organized a neighborhood association, which met under the auspices of the Crown Heights Community Center. The city of Oceanside hired a nonprofit consultant, Community HousingWorks, to do leadership development with the group, said Oceanside Housing and Neighborhood Services Director Margery Pierce.

"This is a grassroots effort to help a disenfranchised neighborhood feel that they had a voice for improvements of their neighborhood," Pierce said. "It was a neighborhood that was marred by gangs, by drug activities, by murders. There were people who wouldn't call police, because their experience where they were from was that you had to pay police."

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Residents ran the neighborhood association with support from Community HousingWorks, which helped members connect with officials in the city and school district, said Jose Jimenez, a former Oceanside resident who said he was the first board president for the association.

"One of the issues, if not the top issue, was education for their children," Pierce said. "The kids were walking, were carrying heavy backpacks up the hill, across railroad tracks. Some of the people in the neighborhood who owned cars got very entrepreneurial and started charging outrageous amounts of money to drive children to school."

Parents protesting at the school board meeting earlier this month said that when the school district closed Ditmar, it guaranteed transportation to the new campuses. Jimenez, however, said the school didn't promise or offer that service until parents organized to ask for it.

The group came up with a plan to offer bus service, with parents paying monthly fees, and Community HousingWorks acting as the "fiscal agent," Pierce said. The nonprofit collected fees from parents to cover the cost of running the line, she said, and paid the district, which provided buses and drivers.

Years before, local women had started a tradition of neighborhood cleanup called "Corona Limpieza," in which they would hold monthly sessions of street sweeping and trash pickup, Pierce said. At some point, that task became an expectation for parents whose children took the bus.

Abandoned furniture, tires and other trash littered the community, so members of the neighborhood association asked the city to send dump trucks to dispose of it, and called on residents to help clear it, Jimenez said.

"As a board, we said we need to do something about this," he said. "We ended up telling people we need to clean up our community.... We said, we're going to charge you this much (for bus service.) If you help with the cleanup, you're going to end up paying less money for the bus."

Some residents said they saw it not as an opportunity for discounted rates, but as a condition for receiving bus service. Residents attended mandatory bimonthly meetings, and swept streets on Saturday mornings, said Laura Cruz, whose three children ride the bus to South Oceanside and Lincoln campuses. When she or her husband couldn't make it to those sessions, she said, they would go at another time to mop and clean the bathrooms or offices of the community center.

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If she didn't help out, she paid $70 per month for bus service. That was reduced to $50 if she put in the hours cleaning, she said.

"I wasn't happy with it, but I figured that as long as my kid has the bus, and they're safe, and I can go to work, I did it," said her husband, Oscar Ahumada. "We complained a little bit, but we just did it, because we're thinking more of our kids than us."

Mora said she often accompanied her mother as she scrubbed the floors, windows and restrooms of the community center.

"In a way, they phrased it as community service, but we never particularly felt that it was community service," she said. "At the time, I was in middle school; I didn't see anything wrong with it. Now, looking back on it, it sounds very absurd."

Both the city and school district say they were not aware of the labor that residents were performing as part of their bus payments, and said they would not have required that from recipients of public services.

"The district had no oversight of that whatsoever," said Oceanside Unified Communications Director Matthew Jennings. "Yes, they were our buses, they said our name on the side. But we did not have any connection to what the city was charging, or how they were collecting fees. Oceanside Unified School District has never required a member of the community to perform community service in order to receive a district service."

Another complication occurred in 2012, when a city clerk at the Crown Heights Center, Maria Santiago Guendulain, was charged with siphoning more than $32,000 from payments made for services including the school bus program. She pleaded guilty to one count of grand theft, and was sentenced to 120 days of jail time and probation.

Community HousingWorks ended its involvement with the program in 2015, and the City of Oceanside took over administering bus payments, Pierce said. They set up online accounts for residents similar to those used to pay for swim lessons or other city programs, and provided receipts for payments. At that time, she said, she also ended the street sweeping and other chores.

"When the city took over, I told my staff, this is now a city program," Pierce said. "We can't put that requirement on them. It was unenforceable. We can't make people do that in order to have a city service."

However, Cruz said she was asked to do cleanup chores until two years ago. Like other parents, she and Ahumada said their greatest concern was not the cost of the program -- in either time or money -- but the district's plan to discontinue it this year.

Dalton, of the University of San Diego, agreed that the most pressing matter is decision to end the bus service that parents depend on for the education and safety of their children.

"I think it's even more concerning, that now they're canceling bus transportation for these kids," she said. "This is a time when we're worried about school attendance, particularly for these communities that may already feel marginalized. And we're worried about safety. And this affects both. This is putting another barrier in the way for them to attend something that is their right, which is to attend public school."

Oceanside Unified argues that it simply can't afford bus transportation, no matter what the need or the precedent. The district has struggled with deficit spending, bitter labor negotiations and declining enrollment for several years, leaving it in financial risk. To close its budget gaps, administrators are reviewing contracts and services for possible spending cuts, Jennings said. The memorandum of understanding with the city for the Crown Heights bus line was one of the cuts slated for next year.

According to that agreement, the city pays the district $2,985 per month for operating expenses, for a total of $30,600 for the 2018-19 school year, Jennings said. Continuing bus service next year would cost $114,000 per year, he said. Oceanside Unified discontinued district-wide bus service in 2010, and cannot justify offering it only to Crown Heights.

"We're not able to provide that service as a school district at this time," he said.

Instead, he said, the district is calling each family affected and offering them school of choice enrollment at any school in the district, including two elementary schools -- Mission and Laurel -- that are 1.2 miles from the neighborhood, and Jefferson Middle School, which is 1.4 miles away.

Crown Heights parents aren't satisfied with those options, and say the elimination of bus service curtails their children's access to education. They ask why the district continues to provide bus service to students on Camp Pendleton but not to their neighborhood.

"I feel discriminated against by the district and the city," Cruz said.

Ahumada said parents are still hoping for a reversal of the decision.

"We're willing to work with the district," he said. "We're willing to keep paying, as long as it's not a high price. As long as the kids are safe. That's the most important thing, that our kids are safe."

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