Marchers plead with MTA board to keep student discounts going

Students protest in front of the MTA headquarters in midtown. Photo by Karsten Moran

Kids protest ‘unfair’ fare

By Kate Pastor

High school students traveled to midtown Monday to do what they do best — make some noise — this time over MetroCards.

Their pleas, chants and stories were brought before the headquarters of the Metropolitan Transit Authority, which has proposed a plan to ditch student discounts to help balance its budget. If the planned cuts pass, students say getting to school will become a hardship for them and their families.

“Our family cannot pay them $700 a year for one kid,” said Yaksitis Santana, a twelfth grader at Marble Hill International School on the JFK campus who lives near Fordham Road.

Though it’s her last year at the school, she came out with the organization Sisters and Brothers United on a day she had off from school because of Regents exams, to stand up for others.

As students jammed inside police barricades and politicians gave sound bites to hoards of news media, some common themes emerged.

What will happen if the discounts are cut? Opponents say fewer students will show up for school, contributing to increased dropout and truancy rates and tempting idle students into becoming gang members. The latest figures for the Bronx show it leading the rest of the boroughs with a 56 percent dropout rate.

“They will have more spare time,” Jody Gopaul, a senior at DeWitt Clinton High School, said flatly.

City Council Speaker Christine Quinn tapped into the sense that students, in more ways than one, feel cheated by the scheme.

She said students are told that studying hard is the key to their future, but if they get into specialized high schools they can’t afford to travel to, their hard work is not being rewarded.

“If you live on the north shore of Staten Island and you get into Bronx Science and your family doesn’t have the money to pay for you to take the train to get there, well getting in is no good at all,” she said.

The issue, though it affects students citywide, may have a particular impact on students in the outer boroughs, according to Councilman James Vacca, who chairs the council’s transportation committee.

“Students, perhaps in Riverdale, are going to Manhattan for school. They are going to other schools. So why leave them in a lurch and place this type of onerous cost on them?” he said.

New York Public Interest Research Group’s Straphangers Campaign has recommended that city and state pick up the costs of transporting students, as localities around the state do. The MTA faces nearly a $400 million deficit in 2010, it says.

The Straphangers noted that the MTA will hold hearings on the cuts during the first week of March and encouraged citizen participation. For a schedule of the hearings, go to http://bit.ly/hearingschedule.

In case such actions don’t work, one student at the rally jokingly said to another that the next step should be to “TP the MTA building.”

This is part of the February 4, 2010 online edition of The Riverdale Press.

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