This story has been updated.

The sexual assault of a Bridgeport teen during her Tuesday morning walk to the high school has raised concerns about the distance that some students in the urban district must travel on foot each day.

The teenager who was assaulted on Railroad Avenue in Bridgeport was on her way to the new Bassick High School on the University of Bridgeport campus. The road where she was assaulted runs alongside a raised railroad track and through an industrial district.

Bridgeport Police charged 28-year-old Cordero Javier Greaves later that day with first-degree sexual assault, risk of injury to a minor, illegal sexual contact with a person under 16 years of age, first-degree unlawful restraint and second-degree threatening. 

In Bridgeport, high school students are expected to walk up to 2 miles before they are eligible for a bus ride, while elementary students are expected to walk up to 1 mile — distances that are consistent with other urban districts and state guidance on the issue.

The assault has sparked enough concern that the Bridgeport Board of Education is planning to hold a special meeting next week to discuss busing and student safety, said board member Albert Benejan Grajales.

“It’s our concern and it’s our priority right now,” said Benejan Grajales.

But Bridgeport Board of Education Chair Jennifer Perez told CT Mirror in an email that there was no special meeting currently scheduled. The next regular meeting is on Oct. 27 at 6:30 pm at the Bridgeport Regional Aquaculture Science and Technology Education Center.

Connecticut state law requires school districts to provide transportation when it is “reasonable and desirable.” But state guidelines published in 2022 leave specific details like walking distances up to local school boards. Although the 2022 document does not give any distance recommendation, a 2008 document showing sample policies for districts recommended the maximum walking distance for students be 1 mile for children in grades K through 3, 1.5 miles for students in grades 4 through 8, and 2 miles for high school students. 

Hartford Public Schools and Waterbury Public Schools also list their maximum walking distance for high schoolers as 2 miles; in New Haven, the distance is 1.5 miles. 

The 2022 document does note that a district can make exceptions for students who could encounter “hazardous conditions” on their way to school.

“This heartbreaking assault on a young student is deeply concerning. Decisions about walking distances and student transportation are made locally, and we trust that districts will take all local conditions into consideration—especially student safety—as they review and implement their transportation policies,” State Department of Education spokesperson Matt Cerrone said in a statement Thursday.

This is not a new issue for the district. Over the summer, Bridgeport officials, hoping to save $4.6 million, approved cuts to the education transportation budget that would have increased the distance some 629 high school students had to walk to school from 2 to 2.5 miles.

The cuts didn’t sit well with everyone on the Board of Education, with one member calling the increased walking distances “really concerning” because kids would be forced “to walk on dangerous streets without sidewalks,” according to published reports, but the board approved the distance changes anyway.

A sudden infusion of funding from the city and state in late August, however, allowed the district to keep existing bus routes intact. The state Department of Education, which contributed $825,000 for transportation costs, also worked with the district to renegotiate its busing contract in a way that “restores and streamlines” the bus routes the district planned to cut, according to a press release. 

Despite the last-minute funding from the state, Board of Education members voted in September to rewrite their policy to increase the maximum walking distance by half a mile for all students.

“The reason we’re doing this is because, yes, transportation was saved for this year only, but there was no guaranteed funding for next year in the budget to maintain those distances,” Joseph Sokolovic, a member of the Board of Education, said during an August meeting when the policy was discussed.

It is unclear whether that policy will be changed in the wake of the sexual assault.

Callie Heilmann, parent of a student in Bridgeport Public Schools and founder and president of Bridgeport Generation Now, said that hearing about the assault made her feel sick, but not surprised. 

“ There really is no safe walk to school if you’re coming from the West Side, West End, Black Rock neighborhood to Bassick,” she said. “The most direct route takes you along the highway, along the railroad, into industrial-zoned areas that are not pedestrian friendly at all, and they’re not even frequented by people. There’s barely any car traffic over there.” 

This fall, Bassick High School opened its newly constructed building. The old school is located roughly a mile away on Fairfield Avenue. Heilmann said the change made a difference. 

“This high school used to be centrally located in the middle of a neighborhood, and now it’s not. It’s far from all the neighborhoods that it’s zoned for,” she said. 

Heilmann also expressed concern about the distances that students in Bridgeport are expected to walk before they qualify for busing, saying that 2 miles is “ridiculously long,” particularly for high schoolers who might be walking in the dark, early morning hours. 

Another parent, Becky, who asked to be identified only by her first name in order to protect her daughter’s privacy, said her child is friends with the student who was assaulted. Becky said that her daughter used to walk less than 10 minutes to get to school at the Fairfield Avenue campus.

Now that the school moved to the University of Bridgeport campus, she said, her daughter’s commute to school on foot is 40 minutes and 30 minutes on a bike.

Becky said she disagreed with the new location of the school. 

“It’s a very high crime area. There’s a lot of drug addicts that hang out on the corners that she has to walk past every single day,” she said. “It’s not safe at all and there’s no crossing guards.” 

Becky said her daughter has been afraid to walk to school alone since her friend was assaulted, and that she’s been driving her back and forth. “It’s kind of hard with me, because I have to be in work by six and I really can’t drop her off at seven,” she said.

Leslie Caraballo, a former Democratic candidate for the Board of Education, told CT Mirror that she felt parents have been left in the dark about the incident.  

Like Heilmann, Caraballo said the new location of Bassick High School is in a more dangerous area than the Fairfield Avenue location, requiring students to walk underneath an underpass to get to the school. She disagrees with the policy change that would lengthen the walking distance to 2.5 miles.

“Just because they’re high schoolers does not mean anything. They’re still students. They’re still kids,” she said. 

She also criticized the Board of Education for cuts to school staff, like counselors, who could help students work through their feelings in the aftermath of the incident.  

“We have a serious situation going on and now we don’t even have people to handle the students properly to make sure that they’re okay,” she said. 

But Board of Education member Willie Medina disagreed that the assault had any connection to the new location of the school. Instead, he said it was a singular, isolated incident. 

“In a perfect world, do we want to have a crossing guard in every corner? Absolutely,” Medina said. But he added that high schoolers would have to walk the same streets whether they were attending Bassick High School in its former location or where it is currently located. 

Lawmakers who spoke to CT Mirror this week were hesitant when asked whether the state should create a statewide maximum walking distance for students.

State Rep. Antonio Felipe, D-Bridgeport, a member of the education committee, said that while “obviously anything we can do to make sure we protect our young people from violence is important,” he wanted to make sure the facts of the assault are known before lawmakers consider drafting legislation to address the problem.

Felipe noted that the state was able to supply Bridgeport Public Schools with enough funding to cover their transportation costs this year, and said he hopes the state will be able to continue that funding over the next few years. 

State Sen. Eric Berthel, R-Watertown, ranking member on the Education Committee, said he understood that further walking distances for students could lead to higher absenteeism, and said that busing students was “the safest thing to do.”

But Berthel said he was concerned that creating a statewide walking distance maximum would force additional transportation costs onto the districts.

“The reality is that we may have more of a Bridgeport problem than a problem that is affecting all of Connecticut,” Berthel said.

Asked whether districts should be given more money to fund transportation, Berthel said the legislature needed to look more closely at costs and budgeting in the school districts before making the decision to allocate more money. He said the state has allocated more money per student in the largest urban districts than anywhere else in Connecticut.

Bridgeport officials had nothing to say publicly about the issue this week. Communications officials for Bridgeport Public Schools referred questions to a spokesperson for the City of Bridgeport. That spokesperson, Shawnna White, said she could not comment on concerns about the distance students are walking or the school’s location.