In your neighborhood

For want of a bus voucher, future workforce gets frozen out

Action plans and mapping efforts for Rhode Island’s economic future overlook the have-nots

A tweeted photo of R.I. Treasurer Gina Raimondo riding a RIPTA bus on Jan. 13, the day she officially announced her candidacy for governor, recalling how she commuted to high school on the bus. For 2,200 Providence students in high school, who live between two and three miles from school, that is not an option.

By Richard Asinof
Posted 1/27/14
The failure to provide bus vouchers for 2,200 Providence high school students who live between two and three miles from school is a big problem if you want to increase the level of educational achievement and grow the talent pool in Rhode Island.
It’s not surprising that absenteeism in Providence high schools soars in winter; what is surprising the lack of recognition or the willingness to address the problem.
The aspirations for an emerging Knowledge Economy are shredded by these kinds of policies that reinforce the structural divisions in the Rhode Island’s economy between the haves and the have-nots.
Is there any money in The Race to the Top to pay the $1.4 million for these vouchers, as a way to address chronic absenteeism? What is the responsibility of the City of Providence to address this issue? What is the responsibility of the R.I. Department of Education to set a uniform standard for distances for bus transportation? What is the responsibility of the R.I. General Assembly to address these structural gaps in educational opportunity?

One of the opportunities targeted by “Economic Intersections of Rhode Island: A private sector-generated action agenda,” talks about supporting a strong and more resilient Rhode Island, focused on “environmental and economic catastrophes.” The idea is that there is an economic opportunity in developing systems to rebound more quickly and limit impacts from these “natural and man-made” events.
In other words, Rhode Island can develop a new sector of economic growth focused on coping with the results of climate change – rising seas, fiercer storms, greater economic disruption – without ever addressing the causes of climate change itself, or even having the courage to call it climate change in the document.
The worse things get, the more money the resilient industry can make, attempting to find temporary solutions, without addressing the causes. It’s as if the economic development consultants are recommending a way to sell life insurance to all the passengers on the deck of the Titanic.
The failure to provide bus vouchers for 2,200 Providence high school students who live between two and three miles from high school, forcing them having to walk to school in winter, resulting in chronic absenteeism that leads to poor performance in school and a lack of future economic opportunity, offers a parallel to the idea of the “resilient” economy.
The state can invest in all different kinds of workforce and talent pipeline development, focused on IT and STEAM and internships and technology programs. But until there is a willingness to invest in the basic equity and economic justice of a bus voucher for high school students in Providence, so that they can get to school on time, safely, ready to learn, the investments in curriculum will never address the root problem.

PROVIDENCE – At sunrise at 7:06 a.m. Thursday morning, Jan. 23, the temperature was hovering near zero, at 5 degrees Fahrenheit, 27 degrees below freezing.

If you were a high school student living in the Chad Brown Housing complex in the Wanskuck neighborhood, the frigid reality was that if you wanted to get to your classes at Classical or Central high schools by the 8 a.m. start time and not be late, you would have already needed to be on your way, bundled up, walking more than two miles to get there.

The city doesn’t provide any vouchers for students to ride RIPTA unless they live three miles or more from the school. From Chad Brown, it’s 2.3 miles to Classical and 2.5 miles to Central.

There are about 2,200 high school students in Providence – many from predominantly disadvantaged neighborhoods – who don’t have access to bus vouchers, because they live between two miles and the required three-mile arbitrary limit from the high schools.

For many of these students, the $100 a month it would cost them to pay the bus fare to get to school is not an option.

Not surprisingly, chronic absenteeism in Providence high schools soars during the winter months. In 2013, Providence high schools had the highest daily winter absenteeism rates in Rhode Island, a daily average of 32.7 percent from Jan. 7 to Feb. 15, 2013.

By comparison, East Providence’s winter absenteeism rate for high schools for the same time period was 9.2 percent; it was 10.84 percent for Cumberland, 13.54 for East Providence, 17.22 percent for Woonsocket, and 9.23 percent for West Warwick.

Providence's three-mile minimum distance for high school students to receive bus vouchers is a mile more than most other school districts in Rhode Island. Nearby city school districts in Boston, Worcester, Fall River and Hartford have two-mile policies for their high school students.

The winter absenteeism rates in Providence high schools are about three times higher than the spring absenteeism rates.

The conclusion is obvious: the walking burden forced upon many Providence high school students is a major factor in their absenteeism, especially in winter, according to Bernie Beaudreau, executive director of Serve Rhode Island and a member of the Providence Children and Youth Cabinet Attendance Work Group, who analyzed the data.

Beyond the statistical analysis, Beaudreau also captured the voices of a group of Central High School students as they talked about the consequences of being forced to walk to school and back home in wintertime. [Link below to the sound recordings of students.]

Over and over, the students talk about how they want to be in class, they want to succeed, but walking miles during winter is often a hurdle too high. One student talked about the problem of getting detention for being late too often, and the prospect of walking home when it’s dark, when personal safety becomes an issue. The student said he’d rather miss school than risk losing his life.

The rhinoceros in the room
As Beaudreau talked with ConvergenceRI in a recent interview about the gap in school busing for high school students in Providence, the anger in his voice kept rising as he described the consequences of what Dr. Peter Simon, a fellow member of the Children and Youth Cabinet Attendance Work Group, called the “structural violence against children.”

Beaudreau said he first heard about the issue when, during a meeting in November of the work group, one of the school counselors from Central High School, talked about how students living at Chad Brown were encouraged to walk to school in groups as a way to combat the threat of violence on the city’s mean streets.

Beaudreau said he was outraged to learn that the students were being forced to walk to school. “If you don’t go to school, you won’t perform well,” he said. There is a direct correlation, he continued, “between absenteeism, underperformance and high-school student failure.”

The remedy, Beaudreau said, “is just money.” If the 2,200 students who live between the two-mile and three-mile limit were given the transportation subsidies to ride RIPTA, it would cost about $1.4 million a year, according to Beaudreau.

Beaudreau said that much of the dialogue around education today tends to blame the victim – it’s the teacher, it’s the parent, it’s the student, and the call-to-action centers on changing the curriculum and improving teacher performance and parent engagement.

The manufactured crisis about whether or not to include the NECAP standardized testing as a high school graduation requirement misses the point, he continued. What Beaudreau called “the rhinoceros in the room” doesn’t get talked about or addressed.

“They forget, [the students] have to walk three miles to school [in the winter],” Beaudreau said. “People are almost embarrassed to be putting this obvious stuff out there.”

And, Beaudreau continued, “They say: we can’t do anything because we don’t have the money.” He countered that the money was there; what was missing was the political will to do the right thing. “People are looking for whole solutions,” he said. “They don’t look for the obvious, simple low-hanging fruit. They want to study this stuff to death.”

Simon, a pediatrician and epidemiologist who recently retired as the medical director of the Division of Community, Family Health, and Equity at the R.I. Department of Health, described the lack of bus vouchers as “class warfare,” one in which the poor are losing badly.

“It seems incredibly unfair and perhaps unconstitutional for kids in Providence to not be supported with bus passes using the same criteria in other cities,” Simon told ConvergenceRI. At the same time, he continued, “Providence taxpayers are subsidizing the parking costs of not-for-profit employees like neurosurgeons or dermatologists, who make $400,000 plus per year and pay their taxes in Barrington and East Greenwich. Now, this is class warfare and the poor are losing badly.”

Have-nots left out in the cold
On Jan. 13, R.I. Treasurer Gina Raimondo announced her candidacy for the 2014 gubernatorial race. Then, as a staged publicity event, she boarded a RIPTA bus, had her photo tweeted, and recalled fondly her memories riding the bus to school, before going to lunch at Gregg’s. “RIPTA helped me get to high school every day. Investment in public transportation in RI is essential,” she tweeted.

It would be a fascinating campaign event to schedule a candidate’s walk from Chad Brown to Central High School one cold winter morning, with the media invited, to share the reality of students who don’t have fond memories of trying to get to school on time through the cold, snowy streets, because they don’t have access to RIPTA bus vouchers. How many candidates would actually be able to complete the walk?

On Tuesday, Jan. 21, the leaders in the R.I. Senate, including Senate President M. Teresa Paiva-Weed, unveiled their “Rhode To Work” plan to address problems with how the state’s workforce is not prepared for the demands of tomorrow’s economy and the inability of unemployed Rhode Islanders to find jobs to fit their skills. Rhode Island President and CEO Neil Steinberg praised the plan as one of the best he had ever seen to address the talent workforce pipeline in Rhode Island.

The Rhode To Work plan talks about the need to change the curriculum in high school to provide students with access to an increased emphasis on IT and STEM [John Maeda is gone from RISD, so STEAM – including arts and design as part of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics equation – seems to have vanished, too.] A first step on that pathway to prosperity might be for the Legislature to make an investment in bus vouchers for high school students.

A bill [2014-H 7012] to require school committees to provide transportation for any student who resides two or more miles from school will be heard by the R.I. House Committee on Health, Education and Welfare on Wednesday, Jan. 29.

On Thursday, Jan. 23, with great fanfare, the Rhode Island Foundation and CommerceRI rented out a fifth-floor room at the Rhode Island Convention Center to stage a pep rally for the release of their action plan for Rhode Island’s future economy.

“My pet passion is 48,000 people unemployed [in Rhode Island],” Neil Steinberg, president and CEO of The Rhode Island Foundation, told The Providence Journal, in advance of the official release of the action plan. Steinberg told the reporter that he didn’t see any urgency from state leaders to deal with the issue.

The action plan, developed by out-of-state economic development consultants, The Fourth Economy, was the result of a series of conversations by a select group of business leaders to target the future opportunities.

More than 300 business leaders had gathered to hear the presentation, many of whom had been invited to participate in the conversations. How many would have attended if they had had to walk from Chad Brown to the R.I. Convention Center, and then walk back?

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