Safety concerns over school buses have been voiced by parents of students attending Cheek Middle School in the Denton Independent School District.
As Denton ISD opened its doors to students on August 10, Cheek was celebrating its inaugural year as the district’s ninth middle school.
Yet, the new campus has gotten off to a rocky start, with parents calling out the district over reports that children were forced to stand in school bus aisles and were unbearably hot due to overcrowding.
“At this point, we’re not using the transportation because we don’t trust it,” said Crystal Hall, a mother of a child attending Cheek, according to The Dallas Morning News.
Located in Prosper, Cheek serves approximately 700 students from grades 6 to 8.
The region has seen considerable population growth, with 18,262 new residents arriving in Denton since 2020. As recently reported in The Dallas Express, Denton County’s population passed the milestone of 1 million earlier this year.
This is in contrast to nearby Dallas, which has actually seen negative growth. Results of a poll conducted among residents by The Dallas Express suggest this has been in large part due to the high crime, restrictive business regulations, and lackluster public schools.
Denton’s school district has responded to parents’ concerns by adding another bus to the schedule.
Before the school year started, Sheryl Alden, Denton ISD’s director of transportation, sent a letter to parents asking that children be sent to school with extra water to help prevent overheating during the commute.
“With it being 100 + degrees outside our AC systems will cool to 80 degrees and then when adding 60 students on the bus that temperature will increase to 90,” Alden’s letter read, according to the DMN. “We are strongly urging students to bring with them a personal water bottle that they can use to stay hydrated on the bus ride.”
Several North Texas school districts have been grappling with the severe weather conditions.
As recently reported in The Dallas Express, Fort Worth ISD received nearly 100 service requests for broken or malfunctioning HVAC units in classrooms, gyms, and cafeterias across over two dozen schools. Officials promptly responded by relocating affected students and staff to cooler areas while maintenance teams worked to fix the issues.
Meteorologists expect triple-digit temperatures to linger across the North Texas region for the next week.