At 5:20 a.m., Amanda Whitner Ruiz wakes her 13-year-old daughter, Lily, to catch a bus to Atascadero Middle School. By 6:20 a.m., Lily is on the bus for a nearly 50-mile ride into town. She won’t return until almost 5 p.m.
“It’s a lot,” Ruiz said. “It’s a lot for my daughter. It’s a lot for us.”
For rural families in Carrisa Plains and the California Valley, where the local school once served students in kindergarten through eighth grade, the loss of middle school has transformed education into a daily endurance test—one measured in dark mornings, long bus rides, and hours lost at home.
Since Atascadero Unified School District removed seventh and eighth grade from Carrisa Plains Elementary School in 2008, children from one of the county’s most remote communities have spent hours commuting.
Parents told New Times that the arrangement strains family life, exhausts children, and erodes the close-knit rural spirit.
“My daughter is going to be 10 when she heads into town for middle school,” said Adriane Twisselman, whose fifth grader, McKinley, will enter sixth grade this fall. “They’re getting up in the dark, and they’re getting home in the dark. That’s no quality of life for a developing child.”
Twisselman has spent the past year advocating for alternatives, from restoring middle school grades at Carrisa Plains to piloting supervised virtual learning on campus.
Her husband attended the school through eighth grade.
“I know it’s been done before,” she said. “We have two modular classrooms, … those are definitely available for middle school teaching.”
The daily realities weigh heavy. Her daughter gets carsick, she said, and the thought of being an hour away in an emergency is unsettling.
“If your kid doesn’t feel good and you have to come pick them up, you’re an hour away,” Twisselman said.
For Ruiz, the burden is measured in minutes. She estimates she spends 80 minutes a day shuffling her children to bus stops and school because she has children at both the elementary school and the middle school.
“I am running four times a day from my house just to the school in Carissa Plains,” she explained. “There’s been big issues with communication with the Atascadero school district or bus barn, not communicating with us when the bus is going to be late, so we’ll all show up to pick kids up. We’ll all be waiting at the bus, and then there’s no bus for an hour and a half, two hours later.”
Ruiz said Lily sometimes misses school because she is simply too tired or emotionally exhausted.
“That’s not fair that my daughter isn’t getting her education because she’s exhausted when there’s a perfectly good school out here,” she said.
Her younger daughter will also start taking the 50-mile bus ride next year.
Pedro Rios, a father of five whose son, Sebastian, is finishing eighth grade after two years of commuting, said his family has managed through careful coordination, help from neighbors, and a fortunate shift in his work schedule.
“It poses a challenge,” Rios said. “Nothing impossible, but we have to get creative.”
He now drives Sebastian to the bus before heading to his job as a teacher at Avenal State Prison. Before that, neighbors helped get Sebastian to the bus.
Without those circumstances, he said, the burden would have fallen on his wife to wake all three younger children before dawn for one child’s commute.
“You can imagine the kind of scenario,” he said.
Rios said Sebastian’s schedule leaves little room for extracurricular activities beyond homework, chores, and sleep during dark winter months.
“If we had the classes at the Plains, it would make it much better for [students],” he said. “It would give them extra hours to sleep. It would give them extra hours to do other things that, you know, kids their age want to do.”
Atascadero Unified School District Superintendent Tom Bennett told New Times that the removal of middle school grades at Carrisa Plains is the result of decisions made years ago under financial strain.
In 2008, the school board unanimously voted to reconfigure Carrisa Plains Elementary after an April 15, 2006, meeting with community members and amid the recession-era budget crisis, Bennett explained in an email to New Times. The board considered declining enrollment, the difficulty of attracting teachers to a remote school, and the costs of operating a small rural campus before shifting seventh- and eighth-graders to Atascadero Junior High, now Atascadero Middle School, or the Fine Arts Academy.
In 2012, Bennett said, the district adopted a middle school model districtwide, moving sixth grade from all elementary schools—including Carrisa Plains—to the newly built Atascadero Middle School.
Bennett said those decisions were made with students’ needs and the district’s budget circumstances in mind.
“Financial realities of running a small school, student enrollment, attracting experienced teachers, and the needs of students” all factored into the decision, he said.
Some Carrisa families, however, told New Times that the district’s rationale has never fully answered why a rural community an hour from town should be treated the same as schools much closer to district campuses.
‘My daughter is going to be 10 when she heads into town for middle school. They’re getting up in the dark, and they’re getting home in the dark. That’s no quality of life for a developing child.’
—Adriane Twisselman, mother
That question landed the district in court.
Former Carrisa Plains student Gregory Nelson—who graduated in 1988—filed a lawsuit in August against Atascadero Unified, seeking to restore sixth-through-eighth-grade education at the campus and challenging whether decisions affecting rural students were made through lawful and transparent processes.
“Restoring access to sixth-through-eighth-grade education at Carrisa Plains Elementary School is my primary goal,” Nelson told New Times in an email. “This is not just about when the change occurred—it is about the ongoing impact on rural families.”
Nelson argues that the issue reaches beyond school configuration and into equity for rural communities.
“Requiring sixth-through-eighth-grade students to be bused out of a remote community, that’s usually an hour drive for a regular car, affects daily family life,” Nelson told New Times. “This includes long travel times for some kids as young as 11 years old, limited participation in after-school activities, and reduced connection to the local school and community.”
The lawsuit has divided opinion among parents.
Some, like Ruiz, see it as a necessary push for accountability. Others, including Twisselman and Rios, say they share many of the concerns raised in the lawsuit but worry that litigation has stalled collaborative solutions, including a proposed online pilot program for middle schoolers at Carrisa Plains that the district ultimately did not pursue.
Bennett said the district decided not to move forward with the pilot after reviewing legal considerations, community interest, educational value, and long-term sustainability.
“We determined that it was not the right time to advance the pilot,” he said. “We remain committed to exploring innovative and effective ways to meet the diverse needs of our students and will continue to evaluate future opportunities that align with both community interest and long-term sustainability.”
The next lawsuit hearing is set for May 16 at the San Luis Obispo Superior Court. ∆
Reach Staff Writer Chloë Hodge at chodge@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in April 30 – May 7, 2026.