KALAMAZOO, MI (WKZO AM/FM) — The Kalamazoo Foundation for Excellence provided City Commissioners with an update into its programs during a meeting Monday night.
Foundation for Excellence Coordinator Steve Brown spoke at length about the Youth Mobility Fund, which is a partnership between the City of Kalamazoo, Kalamazoo Public Schools, Metro and Kalamazoo Public Libraries.
“The high schoolers school ID now operates as a bus pass,” Brown said. “This is also a library card, so it’s part of the one-card system with Kalamazoo Public Library.”
Brown says that the success of the program has been rapid.
“It outpaces anything that any of the partners have expected,” Brown said. “We did a test phase with KRESA’s Youth Opportunities Unlimited (YOU) summer youth employment program…we’re at about 30,000 uses per month, which is outstanding. We’re talking to young people, we’re talking to families, they’re going to KVCC for credits for college while they’re still in high school, they’re going to jobs…so it’s a really outstanding program in addition to the out of school time sector programs that are opened up for these young people.”
Brown says that there have been some challenges with the program.
“Some of those challenges involve capacity on some of the routes,” Brown said. “Those are predominately between 2 and 4 p.m. on the bus routes that serve the high schools, especially Central and Norrix. You have young people who leave the school and they have a bus that’s immediately there to pick them up, and they can fill that bus to capacity. That’s a challenge in that we’re not immediately able to put additional capacity into the system, so that would be effectively a separate bus to come and pick up remaining people.”
Brown also says that the massive influx of students at the Kalamazoo Transit Center could be problematic.
“All those young people arrive at the KTC at once, and as you can imagine, that could overwhelm the transit center itself,” Brown said. “If we don’t have the positive situations there to receive the young people, to guide them to the connecting buses that they have, or to get them interested in other positive opportunities, you could have a number of young people with not the right thing to do there.”
Although Brown says that the activity has quieted down at KTC, the organization is still working to create a better situation at the station.
“We’re still aware that for long-term sustainability of the program, we need to be really on top of creating positive outcomes for all those young people.”
Another problem the program experienced was the need to issue two different bus cards due to system complications. This lead to some cards getting lost.
“We’re working very quickly to get the one card system up and running, so that would be a reissue of those cards approximately between January 13th and February 2nd. In the meantime, we are gonna be issuing a sticker that validates current ID’s. What that sticker does is it lets all of the drivers on the buses know that the ID’s they’re dealing with have been validated by the school system and that they’re okay for use.”
So instead of handing out passes to every student in the high schools, they will go to an opt-in system next semester. Students and parents will have to sign a paper setting behavior standards.
Brown noted that this is still very early on in the application of the program and may be altered later on, but maintains that the program has been successful.
