SACRAMENTO COUNTY, CA (MPG) – Middle and high school students from the South Rancho Cordova and Rancho Murietta/Sloughhouse areas are being forced to attend overcrowded schools in Elk Grove. These schools are too far away from  home, giving them 11- hour school days, average 4 hour-commute and wait times before and after  school—often unsupervised, often preventing them from participating in extracurricular activities. 

Parents of these children are outraged that their middle and high schoolers are having to leave for the bus stop at 6:45 AM to attend school that starts at 8:30 AM, and don’t get home often until between 4:30- 5 PM. That’s before school sports or club meetings, giving them barely enough time to do homework.

Parents who are able to carpool or drop off/pickup their children typically have a 90-minute commute and often begin lining up for pick-up about 1pm—2.5 hours before school gets out. The traffic then gets so bad that children are unable to be picked up for afternoon doctor’s appointments, leading to kids being taken out of school at lunch and missing a full half day for an appointment, instead of the typical hour to 1.5 hours. Traffic is often double-parked, blocking fire and police routes, and for those with disabilities, they’re unable to park near school to pick up their children.

Contact Megan Smith or Shauna Mandell for names and contact information of the below testimonials.

-“Even on early out days, the bus still runs a normal day schedule. That means children do not get dropped off until two hours after school gets out!”

-“My son rides the bus and gets home at 4:30. He has exactly 1 hour to do homework and eat dinner before we have to leave at 5:30 to get to practice by 6:00. At 7:30, I load my 7 and 4 year old back into the car to make the hour long pilgrimage to pick up my son from Pleasant Grove at 8Pm. We do not  arrive back home until 8:30.”

-“My daughters WERE attending KAMS & PGHS. I pulled them out and enrolled them at SAVA Elk Grove in  2022 (charter school), due to: bathroom closures, daily drive, bus issues, inability to participate in school  activities and tutoring because of bus and transportation issues.”

-“My daughter needed to go to a medical appointment in Folsom at 4pm, Albiani is out at 3:20, I arrived at  2:45 presuming I could park reasonably, wait a bit before I called her to the office. I am 9 months  pregnant and when I arrived, I wasn’t able to park anywhere to walk to the office and I could not even  turn in to get close to the school. I called the office and was told this is typical. I had to get out and knock  on car doors to move to the side to let me out of the line of traffic to go park off campus and walk to the office.”