Thousands of plucky New York children trudged to class through sleet and freezing rain yesterday as unionized yellow-bus drivers brought school transportation to a halt with a strike that will make life hell for families across the city.
“It’s hurting the kids,” said 23-year-old mom Erika Rivera, who had to miss work and borrow a car to take her niece to PS 36 in The Bronx. “And it’s hurting all of the parents who have to find a way to get their kids to school.”
The work stoppage left more than 113,200 city schoolkids without buses, forcing parents to scramble to find any way they could get their children to class. Some dug into their pockets to pay for subways, taxis and dollar vans — othets even propped their kids on the backs of bicycles for a treacherous ride.
Upper West Side dad Martin Wallace hoarded five elementary- school kids — including his 5-year-old son, Bruno — onto the 1 train to PS 84 on West 92nd Street.
“I like the school bus, it’s not packed,” Bruno said outside school.
Wallace said, “The inconvenience is that I have to make the trip [with them] rather than just wait at the bus stop.”
The strike — which affected roughly 75 percent of students who are eligible for school bus service — hit the disabled hardest. Many of them aren’t able to use public transportation or regular vehicles to travel.
“It’s impossible for Jessica to get there without it; no bus, no school,” Maria Sanmartin said of her 6-year-old daughter, who has cerebral palsy.
The 46-year-old Sunnyside mom worries about the physical and speech therapy her daughter is missing — and will miss — by being unable to get to PS 58 in Maspeth, Queens.
“She has too many problems for there to be no school bus,” said Sanmartin. “She likes going to school, and she loves riding the bus.”
Attendance was down 2.8 percent yesterday compared with the rest of the month, meaning at least 25,000 students were out. For the severely disabled, attendance dropped by 41 percent.
At City Hall, Mayor Bloomberg said he has no plans of meeting with leaders of Local 1181 of the Amalgamated Transit Union over the removal of job protections from recently bid-out contracts because bus drivers and matrons work for private bus companies rather than for the city.
Asked about whether he’ll take certain steps to ensure the strike doesn’t last as long as the prior one in 1979 — 14 weeks — Bloomberg said he’d encourage the union to hold talks with the bus companies.
“I hope this does not last a long time,” said Mayor Bloomberg. “It’s not going to last more than June — because that’s the end of the school year.”
Union leaders, who insist the decades-old protections must be reinstated into the bus-company bids, said Hizzoner’s decision would ensure yellow buses remain off the roads.
“We remain willing to come to the table to work towards an agreement, and we urge the mayor to adopt a similar attitude,” said Amalgamated Transit Union Mike Cordiello, president of Local 1181.
More than 125 special-education buses were unable to leave their Staten Island depot yesterday because, while the drivers belong to a nonstriking union, the matrons were on the picket lines.
NYPD sources said roughly 1,800 union members stocked picket lines at bus depots across the city. There were no arrests or vandalism reported.
Additional reporting by Sabrina Ford, Kevin Fasick, Lorena Mongelli,Georgett Roberts and Matthew Abrahams
yoav.gonen@nypost.com
