ST. LOUIS COUNTY, Mo. – There were first day of school jitters in the Hazelwood School District.
“It’s nerve-wracking already starting a new school year and then to add these complications on top of it, it’s frustrating,” said one mom who asked not to be identified.
She said her daughter was not assigned a bus route for the first day of school.
Earlier this summer, the district told parents bus routes can be found on their app. But for this mom, her daughter’s information was not there, causing her to miss work to take her kid to school.
“Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, each day, I did call transportation,” she said.
She got another e-mail Monday morning, again directing her to the app for their arrangement.
“School starts at 7:15 a.m. This e-mail came in at 9:40 and parents have been checking the app consistently, including myself, since last week in addition to this morning, and there is no bus information uploaded to the app,” she said.
FOX 2 News called multiple times to the district communications office and multiple people in the transportation department. No one returned our calls. We showed up in person and a security guard told us all we could do was keep calling the same number.
Hazelwood is one of several school districts struggling with transportation.
“If they can’t get there, it doesn’t matter how good your school is if a student is stuck at home and has no means by which to get there,” State Rep. Ben Keathley said.
The Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education said there is currently no statewide effort to address transportation challenges.
“If we find that money elsewhere isn’t going to benefit students directly, then we should make sure we’re prioritizing that as well,” Keathley said.
But with no explanation of what happened Monday in the Hazelwood district, parents were stuck in limbo.
“I just hope that by the end of the day today we can have a bus route.”
As schools let out for the day, this mother and another parent who had the same issues both said they got their bus route and are ready for Tuesday.
