A group of D.C. students will be able to pay for their Metro trips with their student identification cards starting next week. Students at the School Without Walls are part of a pilot program to test loading their subsidized transit passes onto the D.C. One Card. They have been signing up online this week in time for a May 1 start.
If all goes well, every D.C. public middle and high schooler will use the cards for getting around the city when school starts in the fall. Then charter and private school students eventually will get them, too.
Students will not be limited in the hours they can use the passes on Metro, despite an idea floated earlier this year.
“For now, there’s no plan to change the passes, which are seven days a week for as long as Metro is open,” said Aaron Overman, District Department of Transportation deputy associate director.
Metro board members discussed limiting the passes in response to a crime report showing that juveniles made up one-fourth of all arrests by the transit agency last year. Crime spiked on the transit system, with assaults and robberies of smartphones on the rise.
The new ID-meets-transit-pass plan was seen as a way to help curb the problem. Officials even said the cards could enable them to suspend the passes of misbehaving teens.
But news that School Without Walls was chosen for the pilot initially angered some students and parents, who worried they were unfairly being labeled as troublemakers. However, Overman said the city chose the high-performing academic magnet school because about 95 percent of the approximately 470 students there qualify for the passes, making it a good-sized test pool.
Citywide some 16,000 students receive the subsidized rail and bus passes to use Metro to get to class because the city doesn’t use school buses. The District shoulders the remaining half of the cost, which amounts to about $6 million in the current budget, Overman said.
The new card system could cut down on theft, limiting crime in a different way. “The passes are so valuable,” Overman said. “A lot of students have the passes stolen from them.” But with the new cards listing students’ names and schools, students can call in and cancel any lost or stolen cards.
