School District denies bus service to student despite mother’s measurements

When we think of the bus stop, we typically think of it as a safe place for our children, but one mother says the Lee County School District told her they live too close to the school to get a bus route.

She says getting her kids to and from school causes headaches as her neighborhood does not have sidewalks, which she calls dangerous.

So, she took matters into her own hands.

The district says she lives too close to campus, so she measured the difference in several different ways.

She drove her car, her brother drove his car, and she even had a civil engineer use a drone to measure the distance, but even after all that, the answer is still the same: She lives too close to the school, so her kids can’t ride a bus.

It is always a rush at Shannon Santiago’s home when it comes to dropping off or picking up her kids from San Carlos Park Elementary School.

“We both transport the kids. I drop them off in the morning, and she picks them up in the afternoon; she’s been having to leave work early to go get the kids,” said Santiago.

But she says things would be a little less chaotic if her kids could just hop right on a bus and go to school.

“At first, they were telling me I lived 1.85 miles away, which I thought was completely ridiculous, but when I did the Google Maps, it was more than 2 miles away,” she said.

But she didn’t just use Google Maps to measure the distance.

“Well, I drove it in 2 different vehicles; my car and my brother’s car odometer read 2.1 miles. I had an engineer look at it and do the whole route according to what the district gave us, and it was still 2.14 miles,” she explained.

She even looked at it with drone video and had us follow her in her car.

“They are not gonna take us seriously. We even did the whole appeal meeting, and they came back and said we live too close to the school,” said Santiago.

Lee County School District says that once Shannon made her request to appeal, the district followed its transportation review committee process and investigated by manually measuring.

They determined that the home is within two miles of the school and, therefore, doesn’t qualify for transportation.

“I just wanna see my kids treated fairly and given a bus they deserve, and if we look at it, most of San Carlos Park doesn’t have sidewalks, and more people deserve busses than what they actually realize,” she said.

According to the Florida Department of Education rules and policies of the School Board of Lee County, the school district states that students are eligible for busing if they live more than 2 miles away from their assigned school.

According to the district’s measurements, it is within two miles of the school.

No word on what Santiago plans to do next.