Boston Public School officials and Mayor Michelle Wu are asking for patience from the city’s K-12 school community amid abysmal on-time bus performance at the start of the school year in which only 34% of school buses transported students to class on time the first day on Sept. 5.
While the on-time bus performance rate has since climbed to 73% as of Day 7, there is still a lot of room for improvement, district leaders said at a Tuesday morning press briefing where they offered a bit of a progress update.
Superintendent Mary Skipper said, as of Day 9, about 90% of buses are getting kids to school within 15 minutes of the opening bell, while 98% of buses are arriving within 30 minutes.
“Clearly it’s not where we want to be yet, but we are moving in the right direction and we really appreciate parents’ patience in making this system better,” Skipper, standing with Wu outside Ruth Batson Academy in Dorchester, said.
While the first week of school in the district typically presents bus delays, the start of this school year has seen more slowness than usual compared to the last eight school years.
The issue has drawn many complaints from frustrated parents. Two city councilors are asking the state to launch a probe into BPS’s transportation system.
About a third of all BPS students, or 17,600 students, rely on yellow school buses. Combined with the 4,736 non-BPS students the district transports to charter schools and to receive special education services, there are about 22,336 total kids taking the bus on any given day, the mayor said in a Monday post on her Substack account.
In her deep dive into why the school system has been slower than normal to get most buses to arrive on time, Wu said there are two main factors behind the delays: complications related to the rollout of a new real-time bus tracking app and an “unprecedented wave of new registrations right as school was starting.”
Wu acknowledged there were “much more widespread delays” this year, with some schools waiting “several hours after dismissal time for buses to pick up students for the ride home.”
“The hardest hit schools were those in the last wave of start/dismissal times, as delays in the first and second bus runs spilled over throughout the day,” Wu wrote.
BPS is using a brand new app this year, called Zum, for families to track their child’s bus in real time and also for drivers to tally which students get picked up or dropped off at each stop. Zum offers map navigation based on daily traffic patterns for the roughly 637 routes that drivers take each day. Wu argues BPS needed the technology in order to take the district from the 90% on-time arrival rate it achieved though most of last school year to the 95% on-time rate that is required under the three-year state improvement plan.
“Once everything settles, this new technology will help us deliver the best family experience with full transparency about bus operations, maximum safety for students, and the most efficient routes with better data than we’ve ever had on traffic patterns and individual students’ bus usage,” Wu wrote.
In the past week, about 9,500 parents have regularly logged into Zum every day, she added. Wu and district leaders said they’re confident that the school bus system will gradually improve as the year goes on and the system gathers more traffic data and new student enrollments slow down.
Wu added a recent surge in new student registrations in August has also led to a bus system slowdown. According to BPS records, there were about 2,800 new registrations since early August, most of which came in after BPS started planning bus routes.
Typically, about one-third of BPS bus routes change before the school year due to new student enrollments and address updates. This year, two-thirds of bus routes required adjustment before the first day, Wu said. That resulted in many more drivers taking routes they weren’t familiar with once school started.
Bus routes get updated every Wednesday with new student data. BPS is also sending out more substitute drivers and extra buses when certain runs are getting delayed. Officials are also welcoming family and school feedback to smooth things out, Wu said.
Her Substack post added that school staff who are stuck at school late due to busing challenges will be offered stipends through the end of the month.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
