Until this winter, Winooski School District had no dedicated bus service for students.
By Samantha Watson | Community News Service
Five months ago, Nadine Ikizakabuntu would often have to walk to Winooski High School from her home downtown. She’d brave icy temperatures, traverse uneven sidewalks and navigate busy traffic along Main Street to make the first-period bell.
“Some of us really needed to walk, because sometimes the car wouldn’t be working,” said Ikizakabuntu, 17, a Winooski High junior, referencing her parents’ occasional lack of transportation. “We’d have to walk, and then we’d get to school late.”
But this past December, Ikizakabuntu took a Winooski school bus to school for the first time. Buses began picking up and transporting students to JFK Elementary School and Winooski Middle and High Schools following a years-long effort that Ikizakabuntu helped lead as part of a group called Winooski Parents and Students.
Children across rural Vermont walk to school, but the city of Winooski poses a unique set of geographical challenges for students on foot. It’s one of the state’s busiest areas and the most densely populated municipality in Vermont, Maine and New Hampshire, according to the 2020 census. Until this winter, Winooski School District had no dedicated bus service for students.
Many who couldn’t rely on a carpool made the trek across the 1.4-square-mile city to the school buildings on Normand Street within a commercial district.
The yellow school buses not only relieved the kids of their weekday trudge through bad weather and traffic. They also marked a major victory for Winooski Parents and Students, a community group made up of new American families in the city. Winooski has the only district with a majority of nonwhite students, many of them second-generation immigrants whose parents speak English as a second language. After years of stops and starts related to the school district’s funding challenges, the COVID-19 pandemic and driver shortages, the group finally got behind the wheel — literally — and trained its own members to drive the buses.
Winooski Parents and Students started pushing for the school district to provide busing more than a decade ago. Nepalese parents Tek Rai and Prem Bhattarai, whose children attended Winooski schools, are original members of the group and among the early advocates for school buses.
“We started to request for bus service in 2013, but Winooski School District ignored us,” said Rai, who moved with his family to Pennsylvania in 2021. “Many organizations came and tried to help us since then, but nothing happened.”
Early on, the school district’s primary problem was funding. In 2018, the Winooski district partnered with South Burlington School District in a pilot program to offer students bus transportation during winter months. But after three years, during the peak of the pandemic, the district was unable to obtain a bid to continue the bus service due to a shortage of drivers, said Nicole Mace, Winooski School District’s director of finance and operations.
In 2020, Winooski Parents and Students began restructuring their efforts to push for a school bus service. Smaller meetings were held for each ethnic group — including those of Nepali, Arabic, Somali, Congolese and Burundi backgrounds. Students often serve as translators at larger meetings involving all the groups.
In 2021, under this new model, Winnooski Parents and Students received grant money that provided stipends for participants to attend meetings, Rai said.
“Our projects got recognized,” Rai said. Participants not only appreciated the financial help, “but we were able to start making change and accomplishments.”
The group’s current structure also includes student leaders elected by fellow students. Each leader represents their ethnic and language group within the Winooski community.
Passy Matendo, a 16-year-old junior at Winooski High School, speaks Swahili and often attended parent meetings to translate. “As a student representative, I would plan for meetings, like what we’re going to talk about, community needs, stuff like that,” Matendo said.
In addition to their fight for school buses, students decided how to spend extra grant money. They chose to pay for groceries for community members in need and are now looking into creating afterschool options for younger students.
Even with improved organization, school buses didn’t come quickly. “It took a long time for the action to actually happen,” Ikizakabuntu said. “Everybody agreed to meet and talk about it, went door to door to ask the parents about how they would feel about getting a bus.”
On Town Meeting Day in 2020, voters approved a 5.3 percent increase in the school budget, which included funding for a school bus system. That was also the first Town Meeting Day that implemented all-resident voting in Winooski, allowing new Americans who aren’t U.S. citizens to vote on town and school matters. Leading up to that March 2020 vote, Winooski Parents and Students helped many immigrants and refugees register to vote to cast their ballots on the school budget. They also provided interpreters to accompany voters to the polls.
Less than two weeks later, COVID-19 halted the momentum. Winooski Parents and Students shifted their efforts to the immediate needs of the pandemic-stricken community, directing funds to help with groceries for families in need. In the fall of 2021, the group turned its attention back to the buses, inviting school district officials and the Winooski City Council to attend a meeting at the Winooski Family Center.
“This was after we had gone through two years of no bus company bidding on our contract for bus services,” Mace said. “These parents and families had advocated for years for school buses, and we weren’t able to provide any. We didn’t have a transportation provider, and they wanted to know what the plan was.”
The challenges weren’t only about money, Mace said she told the parents at the meeting. “I can’t manufacture bus drivers. I need to have people who are interested in learning how to drive a bus.”
Several community members at that meeting responded, “Well, we’ll learn how to drive a bus,” Mace recalled.
The school district provided a workforce development grant to partner with Winooski Parents and Students to hire tutors and translators and help any of the group’s parents who volunteered with the licensing process to become bus drivers. Many spoke limited English and faced additional struggles with licensure exams. Four drivers underwent months of training and preparation, and one is now in the training program.
Winooski Parents and Students recruited the drivers and ensured they got the support they needed, Mace said. “It was really their leadership that made the project successful.”
One of the drivers, Ali Sadic, said it’s more of a labor of love than a job. Each day, he makes the half-hour trek from Winooski to Milton on his own dime to pick up and drop off the school bus. The starting pay of $25 an hour barely covers his costs, he said. “Money no good for me, because of the gas,” he added.
Drivers scoop up their first round of students at 7:30 a.m., then make a second trip with fuller buses to have all kids at school by 8:00 a.m. Some of the drivers now work in the school district to supplement the hours between bus driving before gearing up for afternoon drop-off.
Mace called the program a “tremendous success” that might reach beyond school transportation.
After the city’s struggle to keep streets plowed after the first winter snowstorm last year, the bus drivers wondered if they could help. The school district contacted Winooski Public Works to discuss whether the new bus drivers could handle snow plows — another initiative to recruit community members to meet a community need.
The school bus effort answered a need for Winooski parents, particularly those who work long hours themselves, Ikizakabuntu said.
“I think the bus idea was a really great one because now, our parents get to rest because some of our parents work really late at night and they come back in the morning,” she said. “So having the bus take us and then drop us, it has been helpful to them.”
She and her fellow students arrive at school on time, without the added burden on their parents.
“My dad was really happy,” Passy Matendo said, remembering when her family found out about the buses.
“He was dancing the whole day because he was happy not to wake up in the morning. He was like, ‘Oh, the bus will be taking you. If you miss the bus, that’s your fault. We are free!’ ”
The Community News Service is part of the Reporting and Documentary Storytelling Program at the University of Vermont.
