On June 11, 2010, nearly 600 students from over twenty high schools, in metro New York, walked out of the high schools at 12:00pm to converge at City Hall. Students from all the different schools banded together to protest the proposal of cutting money from the city budget from New York State that pays for the metro cards, and bus passes. The money in the city budget is used so the students can have free or reduced priced metro cards, and bus passes to ride the transit or buses free to school. The concern of the students, as well as the parents, and the main reason for the protest was due to the fact that if the budget is indeed cut, it will fall on the parents to pay for these metro cards and bus passes which would cost up to $1,000 per student. At least five city council members, including Robert Jackson, who is the chairman of the Council’s Education Committee, as well as representatives from the Transport Workers Union, showed up at the rally to help support the students in their cause, and even made speeches. Mayor Bloomberg made a statement about the students who showed up for the protest and chastised them for leaving class, also stated that the students and parents should look to the state Legislature to put more money into the city’s budget to help pay for the cost of the transit and bus passes. The city is looking for a way to close an $800 million budget gap and cutting out the budget for the bus, and transit passes would make up for $45 million of the budget that the city normally pays in, while New York State only paid out $6 million the last year. The metro cards, the budget money helps supply, are handed out to nearly 600,000 students every year.
The issue with cutting the budget for the transit and bus passes for the students is that certain students won’t have transportation to school because their families can’t afford the bus and transit passes due to the hurting economy. The second reason would be if a family has more than one child which would mean having to buy multiple passes instead of just one. For the parents this means trying to pick up a second job, or finding the money in some way, and if not, finding some way for their kids to get to school. For other students the bus and transit passes mean a better education from a better school. If the transit and bus passes are cut from the budget the students will have to go back to a school that lacks the needs to provide the education that the child was working hard to obtain with the help of the buss and transit passes. Each year parents pay out property taxes to the county so that their child can attend a public school system. The parents expect their child to get an education because they pay for it with their money, but if the kids are not able to get to school then how are they supposed to get that education? When the parents pay out the property taxes, what exactly is the government entitled to provide for the children’s education? The government provides a building for the children to have school, teachers, so that the kids have someone to teach them what they need to know, and the books for their classes. Transportation to the school would seem to be a part of the education system but that is an answer that has not yet been attained. The importance of this topic seems simplistic upon the surface but is much deeper upon further investigation. Asking who should be responsible for paying for a bus pass or transit pass is only the surface of the topic when in reality it deals with the public education of students in general and who is responsible for providing the means for the education of the students and to what extent.
In my research about the city government as well as the federal government when it deals with education and transportation of students in a secondary education I found that the issue is highly debated in many different relative ways, and is not just a current event, but an ongoing question waiting to be answered. My results garnered many different results spanning from different forms of education other than public schooling, agreed and disagreed arguments of government influence in the public school system. Common elements usually pertained to agreeing the public school system is failing students and a change is needed.
