LEHIGH ACRES, Fla. — Riding the bus in high school can be a challenge, but one Lehigh Acres mother has a problem of a different kind. She says the handicapped bus that picks up her son won’t let her daughter ride with him to school.
When Andrea Olmos moved to Lehigh Acres in April, she discovered that her son and daughter, who are both eleventh-graders at the same school, couldn’t ride the same bus.
“He really always depends on someone. So when he’s with my daughter, it makes me feel a lot more comfortable because I know she knows that communication,” Olmos said.
Her 17-year-old son Julio was born with hydrocephalus – a neurological disorder caused by too much fluid in his brain.
His 16-year-old sister Barbara always rode with him on the school bus.
Watch Lehigh Acres community correspondent Ella Rhoades’ report below:
“It just shouldn’t be this hard,” Lehigh mother wants her daughter to ride the ESE bus with her son
Olmos said, “I just don’t understand. If there is a bus stop in front of my house, why can’t both of my children get on the same bus?”
She says she didn’t have this problem when she lived in Broward and Orange counties.
Olmos, a single mother, goes to work before her children go to school and comes home after school ends. She tells FOX 4 she relies on her daughter to help with Julio when she’s not home.
Since the school district does not allow siblings to ride the bus together, Barbara would be picked up by bus one hour before Julio and dropped off after school one hour after her brother’s bus.
Olmos felt she had no other way to keep her children together, so she decided to pay Lyft or other parents to drive her children to and from school.
“I have to pay extra for a service that the school already provides. On top of that, this is a child with special needs and no one knows him better than my daughter,” she said.
Olmos said she couldn’t find anyone in the district who could tell her why they couldn’t ride together.
Lehigh Acres community correspondent Ella Rhoades investigated and found that the district ended the sibling passenger program on ESE buses in 2019.
In a statement to Fox 4, the Lee County School District said:
“We are currently unable to transport siblings on ESE buses due to limited space and the need to still enroll students who require transportation. Once ridership and routes have stabilized, we will review requests on a case-by-case basis.”
Lee County School District
The district also told Rhoades that they would call Olmos to find a temporary solution.
Olmos said, “It just shouldn’t be that hard to get them to and from school every day.”
