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URBANA — Children pour out of the school bus and into the arms of their waiting parents at the one elementary school bus stop in Ivanhoe Estates, a trailer park in Urbana.
The stop is a patch of grass with two benches and a few parking spaces next to the management company’s office. There is nowhere for dozens of kids and their parents to wait in bad weather.
“This is my son’s first year in kindergarten, but this past year really affected me,” Yankee Ridge Elementary School mother Elsy Perez said in Spanish.
Perez walks to the bus stop from her home on the edge of Ivanhoe Estates. In snowy weather, the trailer park company doesn’t fully clear the snow from the roads, making the roads icy, according to her and other residents.
“I saw another child fall because of it,” Perez said.
Yajaira Cuellar is a mother of two. She said when she and her kids wait at the stop, they don’t have a way to stay out of the rain or snow.
“My younger one has asthma and she gets sick a lot in the winter. I don’t like her to be breathing the air, so I cover her with a blanket and I hold her,” Cuellar said. I try to hold the blanket over both of us, but we don’t have any place to wait underneath if it’s raining or anything.”
She said she has decided not to send her child to school before because of the weather, but the school district has rules about attendance. Cuellar said she is one of the parents who is out there waiting every day, even when it is freezing and she has to wait for half an hour without shelter.
The problem affects the older kids as well, who wait at an uncovered Champaign–Urbana Mass Transit District stop.
In Ivanhoe Estates, weather is the most common reason children miss school. A partnership between parents there, CU Early, Urbana School District 116 and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign School of Architecture is working on a simple solution – a covered bus stop.
The project started two years ago when CU Early family liaison Amy Freund was surveying Ivanhoe families on behalf of USD 116. The district started an initiative called ‘Attendance Matters’ about how every late arrival or early pickup adds up, and attendance is the number one predictor of academic success.
“So I went out asking, what’s the main reason your child doesn’t go to school? And I knew weather was a factor, but I didn’t know it was the factor,” Freund said.
CU Early does home visits to Champaign, Urbana and Mahomet families who are expecting a child until the child is three years old. The goal is healthy child development and encouraging families to be a partner with schools in their child’s education.
Freund and fellow liaison Cherly Crosby have become fixtures among Ivanhoe parents and learned that they had been asking for a covered bus stop there for years.
Julia Hernandez said she has been asking the management company for as long as her kids are in school. She is one of the moms with a car, and she is able to get a space to park next to the bus stop because she lives closer. She invites the kids waiting outside into her car in bad weather, but not all of them know her.
Hernandez and fellow driving mom, Priscilla Rojas, estimate that there is at least one neighborhood kid missing school every time there is bad weather.
So Freund began working on a solution, talking with the management company and other potential partners. She now has permission from the company to build a stop on the corner, design expertise from the School of Architecture and plans from USD 116 to maintain the stop.
The project also already has funding.
U of I’s Campus-Community Compact is covering over half of the budget. The compact falls under U of I’s Office of Public Engagement, and its goal is to help bring university resources to jointly solve community issues.
“It was established after former Chancellor [Robert] Jones called to action against the social injustice and racism that was a prominent part of the community dialogue in 2020,” said Campus-Community Compact Director Breaden Belcher.
This summer, the compact awarded $94,000 to projects like literacy lessons for refugee women, improving French multilingual classes in local elementary and middle schools and Ivanhoe’s bus stop.
Every project is a joint effort by a community and a university partner. U of I architecture professor Joseph Altshuler is the university partner for the bus stop.
“The fact that we can’t show you a design now is actually by design,” Altshuler said.
He is planning to participate in a CU Early and USD 116 “neighborhood night” on September 22. During the festivities, he will provide materials for students, families and community members to draw, write or make models of what they would like from a bus stop. Altshuler will consolidate those ideas into a design to present to the Urbana School Board by the end of October. He expects to break ground on the project in the spring and have it open in the summer.
Some ideas so far include a message board for the school district to provide updates, a little library of books and a wall of vocabulary words so parents can learn English while waiting with their kids.
For Hernandez, the details aren’t important. She just wants to know that the management company has agreed to the project and that it will get built.
“Do you really have permission?” Hernandez asked Freund.
“We do have a letter with their permission,” Freund said in response.
The group plans to raise about $10,000 more in donations and grants, according to Altshuler. CU Early has created a donation page here.