Camden Mayor asks school board to move Lanning Square School bus stop

Camden's Lanning Square Elementary School students, who for months have been waiting for their bus—-- without any crossing guards or other security -- to take them a mile away to another school, could soon get a sheltered bus stop.

In a letter to the school board, Mayor Dana L. Redd reportedly says she has arranged for the students to be picked up at the Broadway Community Center, at 7th Street and Broadway, which has agreed to open early so the children can wait indoors. The board must first approve of the new bus pick-up location before it is made official.

"I am so grateful to the mayor, because the board is not doing anything,"" said Sheila Roberts, a Lanning Square resident and activist who has been watching over the students at their 4th and Clinton Avenue bus stop since the Broadway School (read BACKGROUND HERE) was damaged in the August earthquake and students have had to be bused to Parkside.

A week after Roberts explained the dangerous bus stop situation to the school board and received blank stares in return, a 5-year-old boy went missing for more than two hours when he got off the bus and no one was there to pick him up. The boy was found at the house of a neighborhood resident who had discovered him Wednesday afternoon.

"Did I not say something was going to happen?"" Roberts exclaimed when telling the story. "The kids are not safe."

In the middle of the frantic search for the boy, Roberts called the mayor's office. In turn Redd called police, who followed up with the parents of the boy.

Redd wrote to the school board right away, hoping for swift action on the new bus location, said city spokesman Robert Corrales. However, a board decision might have to wait until its next meeting, currently scheduled for Feb. 21, unless something is done during a budget hearing Wednesday.

Board President Susan Dunbar-Bey did not return calls for comment Friday.

"What are they waiting for?" asked Lanning Square School advocate Mangoliso Davis, who has been helping Roberts in watching over the students at the bus stop and says he has witnessed drug transactions right in front of them. "Why would you expose babies to that?"

Davis and other residents are calling for changes in the school district, including the resignation of Superintendent Bessie LeFra Young, Deputy Superintendent Reuben Mills, and assistant superintendent Andrea Kirwin-Gonzalez.

The group, which calls itself the Lanning Square School Coalition, says the district's leaders are not doing enough to save Camden's schools from chronic failure.

"We can't wait any longer to save the schools," Davis said.