Recently, students have complained about the shuttle buses to the Almond Campus for their spring sports. I’ve been informed that the first bus has only one or two students to a seat and then everyone else has to be squeezed onto the second bus, forcing them suck in their gut and hold on for dear life or get a find a ride some other way. Some students don’t have enough room to fit three to a seat, especially with each student having two bags. This is high school, so most students are walking around with back pain because their bag has too much in it. If there wasn’t enough room for any more people, the remaining students would have to sit on the floor in the aisle, and aren’t we supposed to keep the aisles clear? 

In addition, some students are personally being attacked verbally, remarking that the security guards said that they are “skinny, almost 4 of your size could fit in one seat.” This not only offended the student he was talking to but also other students that may think they aren’t skinny enough or don’t like their body size. You never know the reason why someone looks like that, maybe they have an eating disorder, in the process of getting rid of their eating disorder, or have already recovered and don’t want to relive those moments of their past life. When students tried to take pictures of the kids being scrammed and on the floor, the bus driver did not accept it and told the students to delete the pictures. Once they arrived at the Almond Campus, the bus driver walked down the aisle–tried to at least– and looked at students’ phone to make sure the photos were actually deleted. Of course, they found some other way to still keep the photos, but many still complained that this was an invasion of privacy.

When all of this was brought up to the security guards, they stated that they weren’t informed that this was occurring and they wouldn’t have made students get on the bus if they knew about it. The security guards also said that a reason the bus driver could have been hypersensitive about the pictures being taken may have been due to students regularly recording fights on the bus. Based on what I was told, I don’t think that was the reason; it’s pretty clear they knew what they were doing was wrong. Furthermore, how is this taking precaution for COVID-19 regulations? As expressed, this is very unsafe and should not be tolerated. If there were three shuttle buses to the Almond Campus then this would be a different story and the buses would probably have two to a seat per bus, not even having this as a problem.