‘As a mother, you don’t want to leave your child with someone that you’ve never met’: The aftermath of Talawanda School District busing cuts
By Raquel Hirsch
Miami University journalism student
The sun inches over the horizon of Oxford, Ohio, on a Monday morning. It’s the dawn of a new week for the town of 19,000. However, many have been awake long before the sun’s light stretched its rays over the city.
“[The busing cuts] makes our lives definitely more hectic,” Madison Tobias says. “Three schools, five kids and it is nuts.
Students and families of Talawanda School District have had to adjust their lifestyles to adapt to reduced busing services since the beginning of the school year. For parents like Tobias, that means an early wake-up call to ensure that everyone gets where they need to be.
On March 17, 2023, the Talawanda School District Board of Education (TSB) passed a single-tier busing model in an effort to save the district money during an ongoing $5.4 million budget deficit. The decision came a few months after a proposed levy failed to pass on the November 2023 election ballot.
Former school board member Kathleen Knight Abowitz was one of five members who voted on the busing model.
“I voted FOR the busing cuts, and it was the single most difficult vote I ever had as a Board member,” Knight Abowitz said in a written statement. “Given the financial situation we were facing, and the clear failure of the levy vote in the previous fall, I felt like it was the prudent thing to do, given that one of our primary responsibilities as a Board is a balanced budget.”
The levy, if passed, would have generated $4.8 million a year through raising property taxes by nearly $200 per $100,000 value of property. After its failure to pass, TSB voted on several other budget cuts to address the deficit, including the single-tier busing system.
For Talawanda School District, the single-tier busing model eliminated transportation services for all high school students, in addition to middle and elementary students who live within a two-mile radius of their respective schools.
As a result of this change, Talawanda parents have struggled to balance the now-added responsibility of taking their children to and from school, in addition to holding down a full or part-time job.
For Tobias, who works at Oxford Kennel and babysits on the side, the busing situation has made life more stressful. Since her partner wakes up each morning at 4 a.m. to commute to Monroe, Ohio, she is responsible for the transportation of all five children.
“I babysit in the mornings at home because that’s really all I can do,” Tobias says. “Because of not having busing, I can’t go anywhere because I have to be able to help take the kids to school.”
Tobias’s children range in age, from her oldest at 14-years-old, then 11, 9, 7 and the youngest at 5-yearsold. Logan (14) attends Talawanda High School (THS), Marcus (11) attends Kramer Elementary and the three youngest children attend Bogan Elementary.
Driving five children to three schools creates fast-paced mornings that require careful planning.
Not only are sacrifices made in time and gas money, but also in consistent routine, which can be a challenge for some students.
“My 11-year-old has ADHD and has intermittent explosive disorder,” Tobias says, “so a change in routine is a big deal for him.”
While it may appear that a break in routine only occurs in the mornings, this is not the case for families who are more nontraditional in structure. If a student rotates between multiple homes, transportation to school is further complicated.
Tobias’s two oldest are her step-children, so they spend part of the week with their mom. Since Logan and Marcus balance their time between two homes in two different locations, transportation plans change each day.
“I think [my 14-year-old] has anxiety because he doesn’t necessarily like walking to school because he’s always so worried about getting there on time,” Tobias says. “Especially when half the week is spent here [and] half the week is at his mom’s. So not knowing … who’s gonna drop them off the changes every day.”
The Tobias family is not the only one struggling with the change in busing. Andy Rice and Carla Blackmar are two Miami University employees who balance getting their own kids to school while also helping friends with transportation.
“Carla does a bunch of other volunteer work in town,” Rice says. “It’s like another full time job, really, the amount of stuff that she takes on, but she can control her schedule so she can work from 11 [a.m.] to 3 [p.m.] and then go pick kids up.”
Rice and Blackmar are parents to two students: Oran (9) who attends Kramer Elementary and Olive (15) who attends THS. Each morning starts around 7 a.m. so Rice can drive Olive and their friend James Horsley to THS, while Oran walks to Kramer Elementary and Carla bikes to campus.
“Now it’s a different routine,” Rice says. “So you gotta get up and get everybody there by 8 in the morning, and [then] I [can] come in and so I just have an earlier workday.”
On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, Blackmar arrives at Williams Hall after leaving her job at the Hefner Museum of Natural History to pick up the car from Rice. Then, around 3 p.m. she drives to THS to pick up Olive and James.
Blackmar plays a key role among district families, as she picks up James as a favor for his mother, but also opens her home to students whose transportation plans may have changed.
“We had kind of like a planned, ‘Everyone winds up at my house’ situation last semester,” Blackmar says. “But then my friend was able to change her schedule. So now it’s really more of like a ‘In case people don’t meet up with their families or can’t find them,’ then they wind up at my house, which doesn’t happen as often as it used to.”
Both Rice and Blackmar are active in the Oxford community, and while they’re able to make their schedules work without busing, Blackmar acknowledges this is not the reality for all families.
“There’s a lot of kids that do have their own cars,” Blackmar says, “but there’s also a lot of kids where this is kind of a serious hardship, like they definitely can’t afford cars or if your family doesn’t have a car, or you know any number of those circumstances.”
While some students may not think twice about it, Olive acknowledges the sacrifices their parents make to ensure that their education continues as seamlessly as possible.
“My parents … take a lot of time out of their lives to kind of deliver me from point A to point B, which they wouldn’t have to take if there was busing,” Olive says.
Since they are driven, Olive wakes up later than they did while riding the bus. However, they also know that this is not the reality for other families, and that some may wake up even earlier.
“Being able to wake up later is definitely nice,” Olive says, “but I think that’s a liberty a lot of people just don’t really have.”
For families who may not have the same flexibility and resources that the Rices do, waking up before the sun is an everyday reality. This is especially true for families like Jessica Stoyko’s.
Stoyko is a single-mother who works full time at the Wildberry production factory. As a result, she relies on the Rices to drive her son James to school.
“For me in the morning, I’m usually waking up at the very latest, at 6 a.m. I try to get up around 5:30 or 5:45 a.m., but it’s hard for me to get up,” Stoyko says. “And then at 6:30 a.m., I make sure the kids are awake, [and that] might take two or three times, you know. So I’m rushing to sort of get myself ready [and] make sure I get in the bathroom before they have to get up.”
After graduating from Miami, Stoyko did not plan on working in a factory. However, Wildberry’s close proximity to both her home and her children’s schools are the reasons she returned to that type of work environment.
“Since I went to college … the plan was to get a decent job and really just show my boys to work for what you want,” Stoyko says. “But with COVID and everything and all the other stuff happening, it’s been kind of rough and sometimes I get a little down on myself about that, because I spent almost a decade [working, and now] it’s back to factory life.”
Though Stoyko has the Rices to drive her older son, she also had to find transportation for her younger son, Jonah (15). However, unlike the Rices who drive James, Jessica did not know the family offering her help for Jonah.
“I did have to basically leave Jonah with someone that I have mutual friends with. I’d never really met her in my life, but I had to basically trust this person because she was offering to help,” Stoyko says.
“So that’s another situation where, as a mother, you don’t want to leave your child with someone that you’ve never met. You kind of have to trust them because you have no choice.”
Despite the obstacles Stoyko has navigated, she remains thankful for those who have helped her throughout the year, while acknowledging that others may not have the same support she does.
“I just know there are a lot of families struggling,” Stoyko says. “And if I didn’t have Carla [Blackmar] as a friend, and with her being right there, I don’t know how we would have made it through the school year. I’ve literally never had to worry about anything. So I’m just grateful because I know not everyone has that.”
In addition to caring for her children and working at Wildberry, Stoyko has taken time to advocate for others in the district who may not have the resources to do so themselves.
Stoyko has spoken at school board meetings on behalf of struggling parents and students, in addition to using her geography degree to create a series of maps that depicts which low-income communities would be most affected by the elimination of busing.
“I stood up and sort of spoke for the community because unfortunately, a lot of the people in those communities don’t have the proper communication or language to relay how this is going to affect everybody,” Stoyko says.
Stoyko lives in Parkview Arms, an affordable housing neighborhood. For families who may be struggling financially or lower-income, transportation cuts have an even greater impact.
“At first I felt a little slighted,” Stoyko says, “because it seemed like they put the kids that need the most help with transportation on the back-burner.”
While the the district continues to address financial challenges, TSB voted on Dec. 15, 2023, to dissolve its initial budget deficit plan in order to bring back busing services for the following school year. With this new plan, all high school students will receive busing services, and the two-mile radius initially proposed has been lowered to one-mile.
With more accessible transportation services, families in the Talawanda district may be able to find some relief after a year of overcoming a mountain of challenges.
