Hi!

Bad Bad day today....got a card from the school bus company today in the mail with our pickup and dropoff times on it. FYI, school goes from 8:08am-3:05pm. Our pickup/dropoff times are: 6:41am and 4:59pm!!! So Caitlin would be on the bus for over 3.5 hours/day!! And we only live 10 minutes from the school! I was livid!! I called my neighbor behind me whose daughter is same age as Caitlin and her times are 7:07am/3:42pm. But on a different bus. So they are putting Caitlin on a big wheelchair bus. And I think that she is the only wheelchair student in Sherwood (where we live Sherwood, Kaukauna & Hollandtown all go to Kaukauna schools). I don't understand why they wouldn't just get a shorty bus with one w/c spot like she was on last year. Believe me there are enough kids in our neighborhood that they could fill up a short bus by going up and down 2 streets. Thank God I found this site today so I could vent to some ears that understand! I mean, Caitlin is only 5 years old and to expect her to sit on a bus for almost 4 hrs a day?! She just began holding her head up good last year! And the year before last we actually would put a stretchy headband around her forehead to keep it up and not slumped over since we (bus driver & me) were afraid of her not breathing!!

I did call a friend of mine who works for the rival bus company to see if there were rules about length of time on a bus and she said no, but that her company doesn't make such long routes and that the one Kaukauna is using is notorious for doing that. She did suggest trying to call and get it changed one way to a better time, I told her I would be picking up Caitlin from school 3x/wk for therapy appts so hopefully I will try her way and see if I can get the morning pickup changed to a later time and then just pick her up every day after school vs making her stay on the bus for 2 hrs. But it just galls me to think that someone made this route up and thought it would be a good idea for a 5 year old girl in a wheelchair to ride a bus for 4 hrs a day! UNREAL!!! All to save a *ucking dollar!!!! MAD MAD MAD!!!

Lisa O.