Dear Families,
On Wednesday
we sent out an email notifying you of changes in summer school transportation. These difficult choices were made because of continued cuts in our budget from the State of Missouri. To summarize:
As always, our summer school program will be free. However, after months of budget review and evaluating ridership patterns, we have decided to change our transportation services for summer school in two ways:
- Eliminate the morning bus; the evening bus will run as it has in previous years. We will continue providing transportation for students who are attending Y-Care from the Oak campus to the Cherry campus.
- Extend the ridership-eligibility radius to three or more miles around each campus. In other words, if your child attend Cherry, and you live three or more miles from either Cherry or Oak, you will be eligible for free transportation. The same is true for children attending Oak. If you live three or more miles from the Oak or Cherry campus, you will be eligible for free bus transportation. If you have a question about whether or not your student is eligible for free transportation, please contact Carlos McClain at 816-361-7735 or email her at cmcclain@academielafayette.org. Put TRANSPORTATION CHANGES in the subject line.
With these changes we will save approximately $65,000 in costs this summer alone.
There has been much discussion on social media about these changes. As always I am amazed by the resiliency and creativity of our families. I see you working together to come up with solutions including walking school buses, car pools, and transportation co-ops. Thank you for joining together to find solutions for everyone.
The question of charging for bus service has come up numerous times. We had not wanted to add another financial burden on our families because bus service has always been free.
However, we are researching this option for the future.
At this point we are undecided on whether or not these
changes to the transportation services will continue during the school year. We will contact our families as soon as we have a final decision.
Thank you for your strong support of our school and of each other.
Sincerely,
Elimane Mbengue
Head of School