Kids forced to walk miles home in scorching SoCal heat after school bus cuts

Kids are being left to hoof it home in the scorching Southern California heat after school bus cuts — with one sixth-grader facing a 3.5-mile slog because his stop was axed.Parents in the Ramona Unified School District in San Diego County say students are being caught in the middle of an ongoing bus-driver shortage, with route consolidations forcing some children to walk far longer distances to get home.And one parent fears the current heatwave could turn an already brutal walk into a serious safety hazard.Bud Kaelin said his sixth-grade son lost his bus stop at 14th and H streets after the district changed its routes.Officials told Kaelin the old stop was unsafe, but wouldn’t allow his son to use another one.Now, Kaelin said, the boy could be facing a 3.5-mile walk home.“They cut us off completely from getting any kind of a ride on the school bus,” Kaelin told NBC San Diego.The district’s policy says middle and high school students must live more than 2.5 miles from school to qualify for bus transportation.The distance is measured in a straight line, “as the crow flies,” rather than by the streets students actually have to walk.That has parents crying foul.“As the crow flies is, you know, pretty, pretty vague.And yeah our kids don’t fly… They walk,” parent Mary Emily told the outlet.Kaelin said he doesn’t want his son walking more than a mile, especially during the heatwave.“Could he be in some kind of serious situation where, like, he was feeling heat exhaustion and his vision was impaired trying to cross the street, and he thought it was a stop car, but it wasn’t and he walked out in front of that car?” he asked.

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