We’ve been asking you how the issues with the Washington Bridge have impacted your life, as part of our ongoing community-centered project, Breaking Point. One of the people we’ve heard from is 42-year-old Providence resident Meg Disanto, who says the bridge traffic got so bad that she decided to have her kids change schools
“My children were attending the Gordon School at the time the bridge was closed. We lived on the east side. We work also west of the river, the Seekonk River. And we needed to cross the river … four times a day, to get them to and from Gordon school. And … we decided to change schools for our children because of the bridge closure.
When the bridge closed that week in December, it was the last week of school for our kids at the Gordon School. And in fact, the traffic was so bad – it was closed on a Monday at 5:00 p.m. by Wednesday, the school decided to close for the remainder of the school year. It was that impossible for faculty and students to get to the Gordon School. So they reopened in January, when they would have reopened after the winter break, and so we thought, let’s embrace January. Let’s see what January brings. And after about three weeks, we were in the car upwards of four hours a day just to take our kids to school and home. But the real sort of day or the time when I, my husband and I, but particularly me, started thinking, this is not sustainable for our family, was that we had a loss in the family … and they were having a wake on a weeknight, followed by a funeral during the day. … And I spent three days trying to figure out logistically how we could get to this wake. We live on the East Side. My kids were in school in East Providence. My husband works in Warwick, and the wake was in Cranston, and … we finally decided we couldn’t. It was just not going to work. … And we, I ended up taking the day off work, and so did my husband, and we went to the funeral the next day. But I thought to myself, for how long can we do these sort of logistical manipulations and calculations for every little thing that comes up in our lives? And that was the day I thought, “This is not sustainable.”
I would tell people: I moved to Rhode Island and I live in Rhode Island because I don’t want to be in an hour’s worth of traffic or more a day. I live in Providence and work in Providence because I have a four-mile commute, so the addition of multiple hours of time in a car a day … it’s just the last way I wanted to spend my time, and it’s the last way I wanted my kids to spend their time.
So I have two boys, and … my older one had a rockier transition, and my younger one seamlessly changed schools. So yay for my first grader. My third grader, I think I underestimated what strong relationships he had at the Gordon School, because he had been there already for four years, since a preschooler. And you know that at the age of nine, you sort of develop a little bit more peer awareness. So it was harder for him than I thought it would be. But happily, you know, by the end of the school year, he was really in a great place.
You know, there’s, I think there’s a lot of positives, really. … It was a really hard thing, but… we’re in a really good place now. We like the school our kids are in. We like the families that we’ve met. We know ours is sort of a privileged problem, I can embrace that. But it was hard nonetheless, and … this year, at least logistically, has been significantly easier for our family.”
