COBB COUNTY, Ga. — Parents are furious and children are frightened because Cobb County schools moved their school-bus stop to the side of busy, four-lane Delk Road, just east of I-75.
The students speak of dodging fast-moving cars and trucks, as they wait for their school bus in the morning and as they’re dropped off there in the afternoon.
The school district says it’s just temporary.
Parents posted a video on social media showing the children crowding onto the narrow sidewalk at their child’s elementary school bus stop, which was relocated, they say, to the edge of a torrent of fast-moving traffic on Delk Road about two weeks ago.
The bus stop used to be inside their quiet apartment complex, which is where they want it to return.
“I thought sometimes I, like, (might) get ran over by a car that was speeding up the hill,” said Ke’ara Wilcox on Tuesday after school.
Ke’ara is nine years old and a fourth grader at East Valley Elementary School.
She’s been frightened to wait for the bus in the morning, and frightened to get dropped off in the afternoon, even though parents are taking turns being with them.
“And my friends, they were scared, too, so we were, like, scared to walk over there,” Ke’ara said.
The sidewalk, she said, is so narrow there’s barely enough room for everybody trying to stay out of traffic.
A Cobb County Schools spokesperson emailed 11Alive Tuesday, writing that the bus stop location is temporary, and it had to be moved from inside the apartment complex because of road construction that is partially blocking the driveway in and out of the complex.
“School buses are not able to safely enter the normal bus stop,” the spokesperson wrote, “which has been temporarily moved until construction work is over.”
“I think that was the most reckless thing that could have been done,” said Michael Bostwick, a parent of one of the students who ride that bus to and from school.
Bostwick said he can’t understand why the school bus driver couldn’t pick up and drop off students just inside the apartment complex entrance, or in the leasing office parking lot--anywhere but on the side of Delk Road.
“So between traffic and the risk of these kids, it’s just too dangerous for them,” Bostwick said, “so I think it was just not properly thought through.... I would hate for you guys to come out here and have to cover the tragedy of the loss of life of some youth due to a miscalculation” by the school district.
Tuesday afternoon, after 11Alive contacted the school district asking about the bus stop location, parents said that, to their surprise, their elementary school children were dropped off, after school, not on Delk Road, but, once again, inside the apartment complex, and that the children were all told to meet the bus at that location in the morning.
Bostwick, for one, said he had not heard anything from the school system.
The Cobb County school district spokesperson did not respond, as of Tuesday night, to an email from 11Alive asking if the school bus stop had been moved from Delk Road.
No one is hoping more that the change is permanent than Ke’ara Wilcox and her friends, so “cars don’t, like, speed past.”