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Bus crisis: 200 students at one Brighton school miss buses when BPS changes pickup times without telling anybody
By adamg on Mon, 10/24/2011 - 11:30pm
Boston School Committee member Mary Tamer said she knew something was wrong this morning when she started getting one e-mail after another from parents at the Edison School wondering where their children's buses were.
Tamer said at a School Committee meeting tonight nobody had bothered to tell the students or the parents their scheduled pick-up times had been changed as the school department continues to struggle to get kids to school on time. It's the latest snafu in what committee Chairman Gregory Groover called "a crisis" that persists nine weeks into the school year.
"I don't want us to go another two weeks without resolution of this," Groover said. The mayor's office has volunteered a City Hall management expert to help the department get a grip on the issue.
Kim Rice, assistant chief operating officer for Boston Public Schools, said on-time performance has improved, but acknowledged that nearly 25% of buses were late to school today - with 13 buses 30 or more minutes late.
Rice told the committee she was unaware of any problems at the Edison today and said most of its buses today were on time.
Tamer said that might be because with an unpublicized series of schedule changes, drivers could be on time because there were no students for them to pick up. "200 students missed their buses today because of a communications problem," she said.
Bus problems have persisted despite more than 4,400 schedule and stop changes, constant meetings with representatives of the school-bus operator and drivers and a disciplinary process under which a driver more than 5 minutes late is sent home without pay.
Rice acknowledged that while officials have a good handle on when buses are late, they have no idea how many students are actually being transported each morning. Committee member Michael O'Neill asked, and not for the first time, for data on late buses during the afternoon, information he says nobody in BPS has been able to provide.
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Comments
For the fiftieth frickin' time
This is a major American city! We already have bus service! Enough with this school bus crap. Put the kids on the T. Is security of children an issue? Give the drivers jobs as monitors/chaperones aboard the existing MBTA buses. Nobody loses their job, and we get school bus traffic off the road, and we don't pay to fuel them.
I can think of at least a
I can think of at least a dozen reasons why that's a horrible idea.
Your ignorance is astounding
(1) The Boston Public Schools has thousands of children as young as three years old. That's called pre-kindergarten. You can't legally dump a three-year-old on a public bus.
(2) 20% of children have a IEP -- individual education plan -- because of their special education needs. Many of these IEPs legally require conditions for their transportation to and from school. The zillions of small school buses moving around the city are primarily transporting special needs kids.
(3) Other suburban school districts have school bus systems and typically spend 3% of their total school budgets on transportation. They just don't have to transport as large a fraction of their students or to transport them as far as in Boston.
(4) Much of the school bus transportation problems are also caused by BPS transporting all the charter school, parochial school, and other private school students all over the city, in addition to the BPS students. BPS is legally required to transport all the kids on school buses, regardless of what kind of school (public or private) that they attend.
Your ignorance is astounding.
A modest proposal.
Oh c'mon, having little kids on buses would be a GREAT idea! Since city buses don't have those pesky "Stop when red lights are flashing" signs, drivers can just swing around stopped buses, then hit some children that have run in front of the bus without looking ('cause, you know, they're kids). That way, we'll reduce the number of children in classrooms, creating a better teacher-to-student ratio, giving the surviving children a MUCH better education. See, everyone's a winner!
Okay
Then retrofit the buses with "STOP WHEN RED LIGHTS ARE FLASHING" equipment to be used when schoolchildren are on the bus. You've got easy questions, I've got easy answers.
OR we could just keep using
OR we could just keep using the school buses that exist. A 'type C' school bus can have 36-78 seats. With two kids per seat, that's 72-156 kids per bus. The usual MBTA buses have, what, 35 seats total? Add another 15 people standing, and you have 50 people for a full bus. Even without ANY OTHER PASSENGERS, an MBTA bus still wouldn't be able to handle the number of kids needing to get to school. Remember, ALL of the kids in a school need to arrive at about the same time. We're not talking about spreading out pick-up times throughout the day...it's hundreds of kids coming from all over the town/city being picked up at the same time. To make this viable, you'd need to have school-specific bus lines that only pick up schoolchildren and take them to the school. But we already HAVE those, which are called "school buses".
Your illiteracy is astounding
1) Why not? What part of "chaperone" would make that impermissible? Did you read the part where I propose that existing bus drivers become chaperones on public buses?
2) See #1
3) I don't live in a suburb. That's not my problem. We're the city. We're the leader. We set the standard.
4) That sounds like a goofy law. I sincerely hope Arthur Garrity is burning in hell. Typical Massachusetts crap - you make somebody's kid travel five miles to school, then you can't even furnish a ride for them after your force them to do so. For a state regarded for its high secondary education, it's jarring how much of a joke the primary education is.
The horror!
You obviously don't take the T. Imagine having to deal with all those schoolkids on the T! There's already enough of them on the T as it is!
right, like the T is going to
right, like the T is going to get them to school on time.
Actually ...
The kidlet is far more on time now that she uses MBTA buses to get to and from school than she ever was with yellow buses.
Her last year at her elementary school my wife wound up driving her to school more often than not because, no matter how many times we (and presumably other parents) complained, her bus was almost always later. Now, she gets to school on time via the 39 from Forest Hills. Go, 39, go!
Latin, Tech, Back In The Day
I was going to chime in with something about how I used nothing but MBTA when I traveled from Dorchester to Boys Latin (on Avenue Louis Pasteur at the time) and also to Boston Technical (later, after flunking out of Latin) but you saved me from having folks poke fun at my age. Thank you, Adam and The Kidlet!
Seriously, though, Will may not have taken into consideration all of the special needs and mandated cases, but there is certainly basis for arguing that some of the kids could easily take public transport.
Suldog
http://jimsuldog.blogspot.com
MBTA chartered buses
WAY back in the day, when I went to Girls' Latin (now Latin Academy), there was a hybrid system, in which the school system chartered a number of T buses that served the different neighborhoods. I took a bus that served Allston & Brighton, which left from the 66 stop on Harvard at Commonwealth - students were responsible for getting to that point on their own, either by T or on foot. In the afternoons buses ran from Codman Square back to the neighborhoods. If you missed the chartered bus you took the T on your own or found another way to get to/from school.
The BPS switched over to its own bus system when school busing was introduced, since students throughout the system, at all grade levels, were being sent to schools out of their own neighborhoods, rather than just the 7th-through-12th-graders who were in the exam schools.
Ah, Good Point
My senior year in high school was the last year before court-ordered busing, so I expect the system changed drastically before I had to deal with any of it.
Suldog
http://jimsuldog.blogspot.com
that system does in fact
that system does in fact still exist with a mix of yellow and MBTA buses queued up at several high school dismissals daily
Going to elementary school in Lynn
in the late 1960s/early 1970s, we rode to and from school on chartered MBTA buses. IIRC, they were mostly old Mack coaches from the former Eastern Mass. Street Railway Company.
If you missed the bus (which happened to me on more than one ocassion), it was a 25 to 30 minute walk from school to home.
Still exists in Cambridge
One of these busses ran down Huron when I lived there a couple of years ago. Regular MBTA bus, looked just like the normal one, stopped at the same place. Anyone could get on, and I did once, and then realized that I was the only person over 18. AWKWARD! I suspect that it was only for highschool kids,definitely not 3 year olds. Seems that 12 or so is a reasonable age to expect kids to be able to negotiate the MBTA for a simple ride like this, especially when there's a more or less dedicated bus for them.
I didn't notice how the fares worked- I just swiped my Charlie card, but I presume kids had passes issued by the school.
Many already take MBTA as part of official program
Many older kids -- middle school age and older -- already take the MBTA using free passes provided by BPS in an official program.
Part of the problem this year is that BPS hasn't been distributing all those usual passes, or has distributed only a tiny fraction of them. So all those middle school kids are legally allowed to climb onto a yellow school bus and there's nothing the driver or school or BPS can do about -- until BPS gets their act together and distributes the free MBTA passes.
Oh, Mademoiselle Tulip...
...WHAT would we do without your wisdom?
Cute
Least you got the balls to post with a real (sounding) name. I respect that.
bus drivers
So if the bus drivers are 5 minutes late they get sent home with no pay? So if I am a bus driver and i am 7 minutes away from the school I am going to blow thru a red light or intersection to make sure I get payed for dragging my ass out of bed at an un-godly hour to get those little darlings to school on time.Sounds like a great system.
I think they mean 5 minutes
I think they mean 5 minutes late to the bus yard to start their shift, rather than late while driving the children.
Classic.
Absolutely Classic.
I sure hope they don't penalize the students
^
Oh horrors ... it involves communicating with parents?
Medford screwed this one up once, too - it changed the bus routes in the afternoon without telling parents OR school staff. My son was in kindergarten at the time - had his second grade brother not realized where they were, got off, found where to cross a major road with a light, and walked home, it could have been much worse.
Then there was the time that flooding had closed certain roadways since 10am ... and they didn't bother telling the bus drivers or give them alternate routes around that.
FAIL!
Don't they teach school administrators to think things all the way through? To plan things? Or are they too busy thinking about standardized tests to do any sort of critical thinking whatsoever.