So much for standing up for the kids.
Not satisfied with creating hardships for scores of city children and parents by idling thousands of school buses with a strike, this Local 1181 loyalist tried to stop a different union’s bus — by diving in front of it.
Diogenes Ortiz, among dozens of Amalgamated Transit Union workers who blocked a Consolidated Bus Co. lot in The Bronx, flopped down on his back on Zerega Avenue just feet away from a departing school bus early yesterday.
Cops yanked Ortiz, 50, from the middle of the road and cuffed him. He was later charged with disorderly conduct.
On Staten Island, a second protester, Timothy Flemming — who union officials say was not a member — was charged with criminal trespass for allegedly entering a Pioneer Transportation lot without permission.
The bullying tactics against nonstriking buses and their drivers ramped up yesterday with Local 1181 drivers and matrons tightening their squeeze on the city’s school system — stopping an additional 700 yellow buses from rolling.
The heated protests succeeded in lowering the number of routes able to pick up kids compared to Wednesday — the first day of the strike — from 3,000 routes down to 2,320 yesterday.
That means just 30 percent of the 7,700 total bus routes were carried out as normal — down from 39 percent on Day 1 of what’s expected to be a prolonged strike.
ATU Local 1181 boss Michael Cordiello acknowledged the “very frustrating and tense times,” but said his members “continue to conduct ourselves in a professional manner during this strike.”
Particularly hard hit have been special-education students, who had an attendance below 63 percent yesterday.
Despite the increased obstacles lobbed at families, Department of Education officials said student attendance improved compared to the first day of the strike — from 87 percent to nearly 90 percent.
That’s because parents like Monika Koziej got creative by joining with other families at PS 99 in Brooklyn. “We’re arranging a car pool,” said Koziej, 33, who drove her daughter and four other students to the Midwood elementary school. “Right now other parents drop their kids at my house, and I drive them in the morning,”
While parents were moving heaven and earth to get their kids to school, some worried that stressful commutes — and early wake-up times — would impact their kids’ education.
“We gotta get up at 5 o’clock in the morning,” said Flatbush resident Rayann Bennett, 38, who had to take two buses and a subway train with her two kids in order to get them to PS 40 in Jamaica, Queens.
“This is affecting the children,” she added. “I’m worried about them falling asleep in class.”
Additional reporting by Kate Kowsh, Erin Calabrese, Reuven Fenton and Candace Amos