He’s giving it a couple more weeks. Chicago Public Schools parent Deepak Jha says he and his first grade son, Vansh, can only keep up their daily three- to four-hour round-trip commute on public transportation for so long.

Jha was among the scores of Chicago Public Schools parents who received a three-week notice that their children wouldn’t have bus transportation to and from school this year. For Jha, not only will winter affect the long stretches of walking and waiting outdoors for buses during their daily travel, but costs are adding up, totaling about $400 a month.

As the sole breadwinner, Jha said the family can’t risk the impact the commute is having on his job. His wife is unable to work without a visa while also raising Vansh’s 1-year-old sister.

“We had a lot of layoffs,” Jha said of McDonald’s, for whom he works as a programmer. “It’s very scary.”

Given the time he loses while taking two buses and a train each way from the family’s small West Loop apartment to Keller Regional Gifted Center, Vansh’s school in Mount Greenwood on the Far South Side, Jha’s been working through the evenings and he said Vansh is too tired to do his homework.

“It’s not sustainable,” Jha said, adding that despite departing before dawn, his son has been tardy nearly every day. And on four separate days, he had no choice but to keep Vansh at home rather than make the commute, due to work demands.

Currently, CPS is providing transportation only for students with disabilities who have Individual Education Plans or 504 Plans requiring transportation, and students in temporary living situations, for whom the district is federally mandated to provide transportation services. Accommodations for families without bus service, including free CTA passes and stipends, are also limited to students in those groups.

Jha and other parents who spoke to the Tribune said they understand the priorities, but want the district to find a solution for poor and working families facing potentially disastrous situations if transportation services they were promised or were previously provided don’t return.

Aliese Greathouse, a single mom of two kids attending Edison Regional Gifted Center and McPherson Elementary School on the North Side, said she already had to forgo a much-needed job offer — as a paraprofessional for CPS — in order to get her kids to and from their schools.

“Right at the last minute, I had to let the school know I can’t do the job,” Greathouse said. Although she was recently offered another position in the district, the nearly $400 monthly cost of after-school care for her fourth grade daughter to stay at school until Greathouse can pick her up remains a challenge, she said.

Among the efforts to address transportation shortages, CPS Chief Operating Officer Charles Mayfield suggested at a Board of Education meeting Wednesday that parents unable to pick up their kids during the workday consider enrolling them in after-care. A CPS spokesperson said in a statement emailed after the meeting that selective enrollment and magnet schools have the option to request funding for before-and-after-school programming to accommodate students who are eligible for transportation and whose parents have to drop them off early or pick them up later.

He said the district currently has 676 drivers and that it would need 1,300 to provide transportation to all families in need. An increase of about 16% in diverse learner requests has also boosted demand among the groups of students the district is prioritizing, he said. To mitigate CPS’ driver shortage, which is part of a national trend, Mayfield said CPS is increasing drivers’ wages, offering signing bonuses and conducting job fairs.

“We sincerely empathize with the inconvenience this labor shortage has on the lives of our CPS families and students and we will continue to explore every viable option to increase our transportation options and plan to soon give families an update on our status, including if we expect to resolve the issue in the coming weeks,” said a district spokesperson who added that CPS sent families a letter in May regarding the implementation of a July 2022 policy change regarding priority groups for transportation.

At Pulaski International School of Chicago in Bucktown, parent Kathy Mayorga said without bus service, poor and working-class, primarily Spanish-speaking families will be forced to consider transferring their children to a neighborhood school, which Mayorga said would be the difference between their children excelling in bilingual classes on a Monday and failing at a neighborhood school not prepared to meet their language needs on a Tuesday.

“Even though I’m a disabled person, these people are just as much in need,” Mayorga said of families with long commutes. “Their need for bus transportation is dire. Because otherwise it’s not fair. You have to choose between your children or you have to choose to pay bills.”

In the emailed statement, CPS did not respond to a request for comment on whether the district has a process to ensure the continuity of bilingual instruction for any students who must transfer to a neighborhood school, and said data will be released in the fall to show how attendance rates this year compare to last year.

Greathouse, meanwhile, said that magnet schools don’t serve only wealthy families.

“Even though I might not be in a temporary living situation, I might be one paycheck away from a temporary living situation,” she said. “It’s not set up just for the privileged. If it was, I wouldn’t have access to it.”

A number of parents from Pulaski, Keller and other magnet and selective enrollment schools spoke at Wednesday’s Board of Education meeting to implore CPS to resume broader transportation services.

“We have been devastated,” Pulaski parent Mari Ocampo said through an English interpreter. “We’re living with a number of diverse circumstances such as stress, anxiety, insecurity, lack of money, the price of gas, few work hours and the risk of losing them, traffic and the tardiness of our kids at school. Our physical and mental health deteriorate each day.”

Pulaski is one of three elementary schools that offers a regional gifted center for English language learners. Among the services it provides for qualifying students — such as accelerated instruction and a culturally inclusive curriculum in English and Spanish — is free busing.

The equitable model spurred Ocampo and dozens of other Spanish-speaking mothers from different parts of the city to send their elementary age children to the North Side. But the change in Chicago Public Schools’ transportation policy is leaving them behind, they told board members.

School Board President Jianan Shi said he “fully recognize(s) the impact this has had, financially, mental health-wise and quality of life as well.”

Transportation is a challenge across the state, he said. “We have named our responsibilities toward students with disabilities and students experiencing homelessness,” Shi said.

Ocampo and her husband live in Belmont Cragin with two boys who have attended Pulaski for their entire elementary school years. Because they have asthma, which is exacerbated outdoors, she said each son has a 504 Plan, a document meant to ensure the legal right of a student with a disability to accommodations. Ocampo said she was told her children did not qualify for CPS transportation services or stipends because they do not have a physical disability.

“Why does CPS use the term diverse students if only two groups of diverse people qualify for busing,” Ocampo asked board members in Spanish. “Every child has a right to receive equity services and to not feel forgotten or marginalized.”

When Ocampo’s 13-year-old son, Joseph, found out about the challenges they would face this year getting to school, he begged his mother to stay in eighth grade at Pulaski. He didn’t want to leave his friends. She said it feels like the district is turning their back on her.

“When my child applied, we knew it was far, but the program was worth it,” she said. “We are a low-income family. This policy ignores people like us.”

Ocampo said the program has been incredible for her family. Her sons love their teachers and their after-school programs. They’ve been given opportunities they might not have otherwise, she said. They’re on competitive sports teams and learning to play instruments.

She and her husband have had to make sacrifices to get their kids to school. “It breaks our children too,” she said. “They see when we’re stressed. They see when we sacrifice work and don’t make as much money.”

Pulaski has had to fill in by providing before- and after-school care for students with working parents who can’t make it to school at normal hours, said special education assistant Marixa Arana-Martinez, who has worked at the elementary school for five years. She coordinates her shifts with a few other teachers.

Arana-Martinez sees how the busing policy affects the students who have to wait for their parents to make the commute. “They get bored and go slightly crazy,” she said in Spanish. “They want nothing more than to go home, but they have to wait.”

Both students and parents have had to change their routine. They wake up earlier. They have dinner later.

Arana-Martinez has three kids and has had to make her own sacrifices, she said. Standing outside Pulaski’s tree-covered walkway, she pointed at the neighboring houses. “The people who live around here don’t know what it is like to look for a place for their children to go to school,” she said. “But a lot of our families can’t live around here. It’s so expensive.”

A group of working mothers stood outside Pulaski on a rainy Tuesday afternoon, expressing their concerns about the shift in CPS’ transportation policy.

“It’s beyond the inconvenience. It’s a matter of equity,” said Christina Hernandez, whose 8-year-old daughter, Eliana, is enrolled in the regional gifted center program.

Karla Avelar has two daughters, 7-year-old Sofia and 11-year-old Zoe, who primarily speak Spanish at their home in Portage Park, she said. “It is also allowing them to grow as a human being because they’re able to communicate in their language,” she said of the reason she chose Pulaski.

Avelar works for the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children and her husband, Armando, works for a cable company. With such late notice about the lack of busing, they had to frantically search for a solution to get their children to school on time.

She couldn’t take time out of her workday to drive her children to school, and her husband has had to shift his work schedule to make things work. “It’s been chaotic for the past month and a half,” she said. “My husband has gotten in trouble at work.”

Some parents at the board meeting asked why the routing of their children has proven so difficult. Families said they’ve tried everything and see no solution in sight.

Jha said that after he and his wife were initially promised bus service to Keller from nearby Skinner West Elementary School, they renewed the lease for their West Loop apartment. Moving isn’t an option. He said he tried without success to find nearby parents to carpool and he received an estimate of $1,200, which they can’t afford, for a private carpooling service.

“I hope that they give buses to schools again as soon as possible,” said Jha, who added that he sees plenty of yellow school buses at other schools every day on his crosstown commute. “It’s not a very hard thing to ask for. Why can’t we have one or two or three buses going across Chicago dropping kids off at different schools on the way.”

COO Mayfield said the Illinois State Board of Education told CPS it was out of compliance with the length of student transportation times, as of last year, when about 3,000 students had commute times over 60 minutes. Mayfield said ISBE found “we did not make every effort to bring our student routing times down.”

“This year, of course, we tried to do that with transporting our most vulnerable students,” he said, “which are our diverse learners and our students in temporary living situations.”

For the families unable to continue juggling work and their children’s commute, the meeting ended with as much uncertainty as it began.

“What we can provide right now is consistent access to information on where we are and what we’ve done,” said Shi, the board president.

Mayfield said CPS’ transportation team is working around the clock to try to find solutions.

But time is running out, Ocampo said: “Winter is coming. What will our situation be by then?”

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