Thursday, July 26, 2001

By Sean Holstege
Staff Writer

In voting Wednesday to offer free bus passes to poor schoolchildren, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission heard the angst of 13-year- old John Pointer, who explained that school brings hard daily choices: buy a bus ticket or eat.

The El Cerrito High School freshman, like 33,000 other low-income East Bay students in grades 7-12, cannot afford a $27-a-month bus pass on AC Transit.

"My mom has five kids. She has to worry about us eating. She can't afford a bus," the youngster told the MTC on Wednesday.

His comments and the presence of three-dozen like-minded school children persuaded committee members to offer free bus passes in a three-year pilot program and forced the regional transportation to rethink its welfare-to-work plans.

"They've stated their case and they've changed my mind. We didn't have people come down here and lie to us, but they came down to speak from their hearts about what they experience," Alameda County Supervisor Scott Haggerty said. "We're telling children that they do matter."

High-schoolers, activists, and politicians from Alameda and Contra Costa counties asked the MTC to launch the idea in the East Bay, but commissioners said the MTC should adopt the idea for entire Bay Area.

Details will be worked out this fall, as the MTC shapes its 25-year, $82 billion spending blueprint.

Currently, all youngsters pay $27 a month to ride AC Transit. The proposal would let students who accept assistance for school lunch ride buses for free. All other children would pay a flat $95 a year. The program would cost AC Transit $3.7 million a year, which MTC would subsidize.

AC Transit President Matt Williams expressed frustration that the free bus passes would not be offered sooner than the start of the 2002-03 school year. The bus district has to work out scheduling, notifying parents and printing tickets, he explained.

But Assistant General Manager Jim Gleich hopes assistance can come in time for the upcoming academic year.

One way to help poor families sooner would be for MTC to subsidize all child fares on AC Transit. For $5 million, and no red tape, AC Transit could simply let all kids ride free, until a more detailed program can be developed.

Changes couldn't come soon enough for East Oakland resident Edenson Olias, 17, who depends heavily on AC Transit. Buses take him from his home near the San Leandro border to his class at Castlemont High School, his job at a downtown Oakland nonprofit and to the main library.

In his classrooms, he's noticed that by the end of every month, when family budgets get stretched thin, a third of the seats are empty.

Unique Daniels, a 15-year-old enrolled in El Cerrito High, said all of her friends know people who dropped out of school because taking the bus got too expensive.

Truancy hurts the schools trying to educate low-income kids. The West Contra Costa Unified School District lost $900,000 last year because kids were not able to get to class, Assemblywoman Dion Aroner, D- Berkeley, told the commission.