Joanna -------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dear Friends:
The Federal Transit Administration has issued a Notice of Proposed Policy Statement that will ban public transit agencies from providing supplemental school service. AC Transit provides 60,000 school trips a day. Some are on our regular lines, but most are on our supplemental school service.
The proposed policy would make all of AC's supplemental service (lines with 600 numbers) illegal. The most dramatic of the banned service would be the 22 buses waiting at Skyline High in Oakland every day to take students home. Those students would either have to walk to MacArthur Boulevard or the School District would have to set up its own bus system. There are similar examples in every school district in the AC Transit area.
The intended beneficiary of this proposed policy are the private (often non-union) companies that contract with school districts to provide "yellow school bus" service. The FTA seems unaware of the fact that most of the private companies are not interested in providing service in difficult urban areas. It also seems to be unaware that urban school districts around the country, but particularly in California, do not have the millions of dollars it would take for them to operate their own bus service.
I urge all of you to comment to the FTA regarding the impacts this proposed policy would have on the students and school districts with which you are associated. (Instructions on how to send the comment are below.) If you are part of school board or other institution or agency, I urge you to have your counsel review the federal register notice and draft a letter for the agency. I have attached the memorandum from AC's General Counsel and the Federal Register Notice for your information. Finally, please forward this message to any individual(s) or organization(s) in your address books that are concerned with urban school districts in California or anywhere else in the United States. Comments are due by 18 June 2008.