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Public Transportation for Your Students
Posted by Lisa Whitlow-Hill on 2/23/2018 7:00:00 AM
I am a firm believer that we need to empower Transition Students to access Public Transportation. While many students are comfortable with school buses they are less experienced with options such as Access Johnson County or IndyGo. INSPIRE students spent last Thursday planning how they would go from Franklin College to the City Market in Indianapolis. This was a very challenging process for some of our students. As a group they had to figure out how they would individually come from their home communities, Trafalgar, Greenwood, Franklin, Indianapolis, and Greenfield, and then get on Access to ride to Greenwood Park Mall which would take them to the Indianapolis City Market. They practiced some flexible thinking and decided they needed to change a few of the normal commutes, to come together at the Franklin Walmart then ride Access to the Greenwood Park Mall with enough time to catch the IndyGo bus and make it to downtown Indy for lunch.
Once they had that hurdle solved they worked together to come up with a plan! We armed them with advice, maps, and knowledge then they spread their wings to fly! When the day came to execute our plan, it brought warm/rainy weather. One student had already called to say they were sick, one student overslept and missed the bus, but we were armed with knowledge and our umbrellas, we left from Franklin College to head to the Franklin Walmart.
Everyone arrived at Walmart on schedule, and we were off to Greenwood! We got to the mall on schedule, and then the process to get our group on the IndyGo bus and pay for each trip individually was a process, but the IndyGo driver was very kind. One student only had a ten dollar bill (it cost $1.75 with no change returned), so staff paid for his trip. A few minutes later, we were headed to Indianapolis. The ride was uneventful, and we arrived at the Transit Center in good shape. As we stepped off the bus in Indy, the rain started coming down in buckets! A few of us had umbrellas, others did not, but it did not phase anyone. One rather tall student tried to get under the umbrella of staff and a student who were quite a bit shorter, it was rather comical... We got to the City Market, had a variety of lunches, as well as a trip to the coffee bar. Our return trip to Greenwood went well, except the IndyGo bus had to make numerous stops, which put them behind schedule for us to get back to the Mall and Franklin College. Access was kind enough to wait on us, which put their own schedules behind. We made it back to our planned return points, and a long successful day came to an end. Our students are now armed with information and a plan, they can get from southern Johnson County to downtown Indianapolis, without expecting their parents/siblings/friends to provide transportation! Empowerment is a beautiful thing!
Lisa Whitlow-Hill, INSPIRE Coordinator
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