HAYS COUNTY, Texas (KXAN) – Samantha Kroeker, her husband and four kids live in a community around a mile down the road from Science Hall Elementary, where one of her kids goes to school.
Last school year, a Hays Consolidated Independent School District bus picked up her son and other kids in the neighborhood along a busy road to take them to school. Kroeker recently learned this won’t happen in the upcoming 2024 to 2025 school year.
“They said that since there’s now a sidewalk from here to the school, [it’s] not considered a hazardous route anymore,” she said.
The Texas Education Agency (TEA) allocates funding to school districts for students who live more than two miles away from a school. A school district can designate areas “hazardous routes,” if it is less than two miles away from the school but could make walking unsafe, according to Hays CISD.
This allows a district to get additional funding for bus services for those students.
With the addition of the sidewalk, Kroeker’s route no longer fits the state’s definition of hazardous, according to Hays CISD. But with many cars speeding down a road where many kids will have to cross with the help of crosswalks, Kroeker is still concerned.
“People don’t care when they drive over here. It’s an extremely dangerous road because people are always speeding,” she said. “I’m not going to send my kids – my 4-and-a-half-year-old and my 6-and-a-half-year-old to walk a mile to school on an extremely dangerous road [while] having to cross so many times.”
Limited by funding
Hays CISD said under the state’s current transportation allotment formula, it can only provide bus services to so many students.
“We completely empathize with the parents and their concerns about this,” said Tim Savoy, a Hays CISD spokesperson.
“When you have the improvements that come in on these roadways, then they can lose their hazardous route status, [and] the district loses funding for it,” he continued
Savoy said the only way to keep bus services going in areas no longer considered hazardous would be to reallocate funding from other essential programs.
“If we make an exception, then there’s so many areas that we would [need] to use the bulk of our funding to drive people to school. But then we would not have money left, if you will, to provide the curriculum and education services once they get there,” he said.
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