Where’s that school bus?
Nearly halfway into the year, many children are still waiting
By Alain Jehlen
(First of two articles)
Months after the start of the new school year, parents and their supporters are losing patience with BPS efforts to get bus transportation to work.
The latest reports suggest a bad situation has gotten worse since the end of the holidays. Families have started reporting that their children have missed complete days of school if they couldn’t transport them themselves.
Last fall, when a bus didn’t show up, BPS would send another bus. The student would miss part of the school day, but not the whole day, according to Jakira Rogers of Massachusetts Advocates for Children (MAC). But now, for some students, there’s no follow up bus.
Rogers leads MAC’s Racial Equity and Access Program and takes calls from BPS families through MAC’s statewide Helpline.
At a City Council hearing on BPS bus transportation in November, Shamia Wall, parent of an autistic child in K-1, told a harrowing story of frustrating week after week trying to deal with bus chaos. She often didn’t know if her daughter could ride to school on a BPS bus or whether she would need to drive her daughter, and then be late for work.
Finally, she said, “I kind of hit a breaking point, which is when I got pretty loud on Twitter, and thankfully the Director of Transportation and the Mayor actually met with me to talk about my issues and I haven’t been having much issues since.”
Other parents have not made out as well.
They’ve pleaded, they’ve badgered, they’ve appealed through the state’s formal complaint process, but still, every day, about one in 10 buses gets to school late, as of the latest BPS official report.
Parents’ stress levels are through the roof. Some are in danger of losing their jobs because they are so often late for work.
Advocates who try to help parents are losing patience, too. “One of my biggest frustrations with the district is the gaslighting of the [family] experience,” said Jakira Rogers of MAC at the Council’s BPS transportation hearing in November.
Rogers was responding to testimony from Lauren Viviani, BPS Assistant Superintendent of Special Education. Viviani had just assured the Council that BPS is reaching out to families of children with disabilities to tell them about compensatory services that their children can receive to make up for what they miss due to late buses.
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Said Rogers, “I have never once — I just want to emphasize — never once spoken to a family who has a child receiving special education services [who] … was informed of what they may legally be entitled to through compensatory education.”
A change in attitude
Rogers says she’s held several meetings with Superintendent Mary Skipper and her top transportation aides, and the tone of the first meetings was collaborative. But the most recent meeting in December was different. Superintendent Skipper didn’t come and the officials who did attend seemed defensive, not interested in working with MAC. At the end, BPS officials wouldn’t even commit to another meeting.
Back in September when it became clear that BPS transportation was having yet another rocky start, MAC and 11 other organizations wrote to the superintendent demanding that Skipper make it a top priority to get children to school. The letter pointed out that BPS is breaking federal law when it fails to fulfill the special education plan of a student with disabilities, and many of those plans call for bus transportation.
The basic problem: a shortage of drivers and monitors
Administration officials’ main explanation for the problems is that they have not been able to hire enough drivers and bus monitors.
The MAC letter proposed ways to improve recruitment, and also said BPS should offer taxi vouchers to families, so those that don’t have cars can get their children to school even if the bus doesn’t come. The adults would still lose working time, but at least the children could get an education.
BPS Director of Transportation Delavern Stanislaus told the School Committee October 26 that she was negotiating a contract with Lyft. On November 2, Skipper told the Committee she expected the contract to be completed by Thanksgiving. But the holiday passed with no agreement.
Who gets left behind?
The bus problems especially affect children with disabilities. Director of Transportation Stanislaus told the City Council in November that 2,145 students with disabilities need monitors on the buses to help them. That number is up 137 percent from 2014–2015 and 30 percent from last year. Students who need monitors make up about one-tenth of the 22,000 students who BPS buses to schools, including charter and private schools.
Thirty-five percent of the bus trips that should have monitors are uncovered, officials told the Council.
Rogers points out that Black and brown families are disproportionately affected by bus delays. “We need to see action,” she says. “We can’t wait for spring to come and realize there’s been no progress.”
(Disclosure: Jakira Rogers and Alain Jehlen are both members of the board of Citizens for Public Schools.)
