End the School Bus Nightmares for New York Families

My 15-year-old son with Autism was on those public school buses for many, many years and it's so very sad that these unacceptable conditions have persisted. It was the same each and every year -- unrealistic routes, mind-numbing bureaucracy when parents tried to advocate, and a ridiculous amount of mismanagement and lack of responsibility. I had the honor of working for Kim Sweet at Advocates for Children many years ago -- I truly hope that her heroic efforts in this arena will finally pay off and that NYC learns to respect its most vulnerable population.

My eight year old twins, born 15 weeks early, have been riding the NYC school buses since they were three years old. Many of the drivers and matrons have been responsible and caring, but we have also had a driver who used obscenities, screamed at the matron in front of the children, pulled away from the curb before my child was seated (much less buckled in), routinely showed up late or not at all, waited only one minute outside our building before pulling away without my child (despite having told us a later pick up time), etc. I, and other parents like myself, who have jobs and other children to get to school, spend our mornings attempting to reach bus companies who don't answer the phone, OPT with its ridiculous wait times due to the horrible bus service, matrons, and other parents on our children's routes, all to figure out where the bus is. Thankfully we have not experienced anything as horrible as the story told in this article. However, the bus service this year has been the worst, hands down, and has caused unending frustration and anxiety, particularly for our children. SN children often can't attend school close to home due to the realities of the NYC public school system. GPS would be a good start to improving the bus system, but I would envision that as just one piece of a much-needed larger solution. I am glad this issue is finally getting some attention.

I live upstate and thankfully we don’t have these problems. I have to say, if we did I would be sure to vote out the people in charge. Why are Democrats always elected when they are failing to adddress these serious problems?

I experienced anxiety when my special needs child had to ride the bus and then my niece was placed on the wrong bus twice in the same year, ultimately missing for an hour. I have been working tirelessly to meet and work with schools and decision makers to incorporate a program that supports the student, pre-k thru 12th, including special needs, also providing feedback to the parents. I have been met with a lot of closed doors and resistance to improve current processes. We are successful in Texas, parents are very happy with the results and there has been a decrease in unreported incidents since adoption. Keeping Your Kids Safe is the goal and we are very interested in working with the New York team to evaluate if the program meets the minimum requirement to implement. No child should have to experience nightmares from a bad bus ride nor should a parent feel helpless by the larger committee managing the daily transport of many students.

My special needs child has been bussed to different schools around New York City for the past 10 years. Most, though not all, of the drivers and matrons have been kind and responsible and have tried to work with the schools and the families to get the children to school safely and on time. The problem we have encountered has been with the office of pupil transportation and the bus companies who do not communicate with parents, schools, or each other and the system defies all common sense, parents can spend hours each day without exaggeration waiting on hold in an attempt to communicate with OPT. The routes are decided with no regard to geography, school schedules or student needs. Students within blocks of their local schools can ride around in circles for hours to pick up other children or may wait in the bus outside of school because OPT mandates random bus pickup times. With some common sense, an effort to communicate with relevant parties and minimal technology this is a solvable problem. Please let’s try to do better for our cities special needs kids and their families.

As the mother of a special needs child, I can speak to the insanity of this situation here in NYC. My child acted out at school the year that her route was 90 mins each way (the max allowed -- who would sentence any child to 3 hours of bus rides a day??). It was a nightmare. I never know how long we'd have to wait at the beginning or end of days; my work schedule suffered; she was consistently late to extra curricular activities or after school care, which caused more problems as those providers complained about the disruptions. We only live a few exits from school. We've been lucky to have mostly reliable, respectful driver/matron teams but the two years that we didn't (one was routinely 45 mins late to pick up; another team refused to communicate about any issues that came up). Training is woeful and compensation is clearly inadequate; women and people of color are disproportionately affected by this exploitation. It is so stressful to be the parent of a SN child -- adding this kind of instability to the daily routine is cruel. And the documentation and fights required to fix bad routes is practically a part-time job -- most of us don't have the bandwidth. The system is beyond broken and I'm glad that it's finally getting the attention it deserves. Working parents of this vulnerable population need more support in general but at the very least, reliable transportation to school

I have two special needs students that use the bus and I have worked for a bus company as a matron. first of all the main problem is companies are buying contracts they can't possible service this cause delays on pick up and drop off. opt provides companies with outrageous routes that they can't make any changes to, how could one route go through bronx, Manhattan, queens and Brooklyn in a timely fashion. this is not the only route opt has given to numerous bus company throughout the years. my 3 year old rides for 3 hours with 22 other students that live in Manhattan and the bronx meanwhile there are three other buses in the school with a substantial less amount of kids also kids are not routed by where they live. a gps system might be able to offer some peace of mind to know where the bus is or your child but it won't solve the lack of drivers/matron to service the students which cause the delays and it won't fix the ridiculous routes opt creates. maybe those funds should be allocated to fixing the above issues first .

Why couldn't we be like other countries and have children who live in cities take public transportation to school? Children could be given free bus and metro passes by the municipal government and have special sessions before school where they receive a lesson in how to be safe when taking public transportation. They would gain in independence, self-reliance, and autonomy -- all crucial things they need to learn in academic subjects. Children with special needs could still be bused specially. If fewer children are bussed overall because the majority is taking public transportation, then funding and resources would be freed to do a better job transporting special needs children or very young children who aren't yet able to use public transport and require more help.

I'm sure it won't be a popular opinion, but perhaps it's unrealistic for the parents of special needs kids to expect that hundreds of children can be bussed from various corners of the city to schools that are nowhere near them, all arriving at the perfect time and without having had to endure long commutes while being attentively supervised the whole way. It's not feasible to send a bus to pick up one or two kids from a neighborhood where none of the other kids attend the special school and drive them straight there without servicing other students. It's also not feasible to drop an entire busload of kids off an hour early so a special needs kid can be taken someplace else and still arrive on time. The bus companies are rightfully going to do what makes sense for the greatest number of students. Perhaps the schools could consider keeping special needs kids in schools closer to home, staggering the times that kids receive special instruction at different schools, and having a few well-paid special education teachers travel from school to school to teach them.

In Sydney, the regional bus system employs drivers who work all routes across the entire system full time. Drivers work both school bus routes and regular city routes on any given day. The buses are the same, only the signs on the bus change. Students get free bus passes. The starting salary is AUD 70,000/USD $50,200/yr. Disabled children are accomodated in smaller minibuses. All the buses are clean, comfortable, air conditioned in the summer and heated in the winter. All of the buses are GPS tracked. In the last election, we voted in a State Government that made transport their top priority and they have done a great job providing a transport system that people enjoy using. The money spent on designated yellow school buses in the NYC could be better consolidated with the general transportation system and the drivers offered full time employment. Just flip the route sign to a yellow one.

Not opposed to GPS tracking of school buses. Just watch, the city will find an unimaginably expensive way to do that.

The city is busing special education students, not non-disabled kids. They are required to by law. Children from outer boros attend special ed schools in Manhattan and elsewhere. They have to attend them because the public schools cannot serve them. My own son, now grown, was nearly left by a careless bus driver and aide in the lot in Queens because they were literally too lazy to walk to the back of the mini-bus to make sure they'd dropped off all the kids. That was in 2001. It's not better now.

School bus drivers have always been the worst. They're failed public transport drivers and theyll always resent that. School buses are guaranteed to be part time too, so it's never a real job. They're also incredibly entitled on the road because they *know* they're always in the right. As a pedestrian I almost got run over by one once.

I live in Tenafly, NJ -- a neighborhood that differs substantially in its demographics than the ones mentioned in this article. In spite of exorbitant property taxes, a good portion of students are left to fend for themselves (i.e. walk in increasingly traffic-choked streets), or parents scramble to get their kids to/from school. This is due in part to New Jersey's antiquated school bus travel radius, which was written back when people supposedly walked to school uphill, both ways, in a blizzard. This is not a problem just in poor neighborhoods. Somehow "money isn't available" in the suburbs of New York either. Somehow, however, countless Midwestern Podunk towns across the country have figured out how to do it. This is a regional problem that cuts across demographics and income levels.

One the school system needs is one school & one bus for each child, a few hundred thousand schools serviced by a few hundred thousand buses, it would be expensive, clog the highways, give work to hundreds of thousands of more teachers & make sure that no other services could be provided to anyone else in new york, but it would fix the problem

My son is currently spending two hours on the bus and he is only three years old! I have complaint since the beginning of the school year to OPT and the bus company to no avail. The bus company has received numerous violations from OPT inspections and still it’s like they don’t care!!! It breaks my heart to see my son coming off the school bus sleepy and tired everyday. He was so excited about taking the bus but no he asks me to take the train to school instead. It’s my first time putting one of my kids on a school bus and it had been the most horrific experience so far. Hopefully something can be done about this soon!

If Uber provides a solution to this can we loosen restrictions on them?

Has anyone looked into possible organized crime influence on bus services?

According to today's NY Daily News, The feds raided OPT this AM, seizing records into some kind of probe related to shady bus contract schemes. There is money to be saved in eliminating corruption. http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/education/ny-metro-feds-probe-city-school-bus-corruption-20181112-story.html

The whole "get a gps system so we can hold them accountable" idea is a farce. The issue is obviously lack of funding an adequate system, so the proposal is to spend more funding to determine that yes, the system is inadequate. "Hold them accountable" means "see if we can squeeze more water out of the stone." Money spent on the GPS system is much better spent on more buses and drivers. GPS system is a luxury. And while it's totally pointless if you actually want to solve the problem, it is incredibly convenient for people who don't want to face the hard truth that, as a country, we've underinvested in basic governance for the better part of 40 years. And that's it's true purpose - to send the message that, hey, the problem is lazy government workers!

This opinion piece is a real head scratcher. Is the writer really so clueless that she misses the core issue - bus driver pay and working conditions? Wow! Quality school bus service begins and ends with the driver. The NYC school bus driver is usually an impoverished, uneducated immigrant who lives 2 hours away from the school bus depot. He or she accepts meager wages, insane working hours and conditions and little job security because no one else will accept this job. He or she has a minimum of training in handling the bus and almost zero training in handling children. As a middle class parent, you can be assured I have organized my life in such a way that my children only get on a school bus for the occasional school trip to a museum; and I am comforted by the fact that there are many parent chaperones on board for these rare trips. Solving this issue is simple: offer a living wage to the bus driver.

Missing from this is a discussion of Metrocards given to city children for transportation. Right now they are based on distance, which is not a bad thing. But many children who are far from schools are issued only HALF fare cards. That makes no sense. What kid is going to carry, consistently, the other half fare? Filling and refilling to make up the amount is ridiculous. The city should provide all kids outside walking distance with full fare cards

Maybe students should be allocated to schools near their homes instead of being bussed all over the City in a social engineering experiment.

A child who puts her hands over her ears and screams repeatedly in unfamiliar environments perhaps needs an alternative to school bus transportation, among other things.

My husband is a school bus driver, for 17 years. It's a full time job with part-time pay. Driving conditions here in rural Idaho are quite different, but kids and motorists cause the same difficulty universally, it seems. At least he is a school district employee here, part of the team, and not a hired private contractor like New York seems to have, untied to the schools they serve.

The problems of pairing riders with certain needs with the optimal means of transport and of optimizing routes to minimize commute times would seem to be tailor made for an application of artificial intelligence. I am surprised that there are not tech companies out there, offering to sell places like the New York Public Schools a solution to this problem. UberSchools, anyone?

Students like Suniyah who are significantly disabled, need special help. Trying to mainstream them in regular schools and on regular buses does them no favors. Fund whatever is necessary to provide a safe environment tailored to their needs, rather than trying to make one system fit everyone.

Reading this after the Amazon headquarters article makes me fume. We cannot provide reliable bus service to our CHILDREN, yet we give $2 billion in tax incentives to a company that does not need it? These priorities are so backwards I struggle to find the (polite) words to describe them. We can, and must, do better than this.

A crucial problem in NYC school bus routes is that NYC traffic has become much more congested! And many vehicle drivers lack courtesy! Very difficult problem.

There are three key words missing from this discussion: "pay," "wages," and "private." I'm not a New Yorker, but I was a school bus driver in two states and I follow some aspects of the industry fairly closely. I have noted that school districts nationwide have great difficulty recruiting and retaining good drivers, for the simple reason that they offer beggarly wages. The old maxim that "you get what you pay for" definitely applies here. Nationwide, school bus drivers cannot afford to live on their wages. That's bad enough during recessions, but utterly indefensible in times of relatively full employment. Consider for a moment what is asked of a school bus driver - not only must they be safe drivers, but they must be able to handle emergencies, know first aid, manage students and know their city. Exacerbating the problem is the reliance in many areas - NYC included - upon privatized bus systems. It's simple logic - the only way private school bus companies can operate profitably while "saving" public money is to skimp on wages and/or bus maintenance. The consequences are obvious, as noted in this op-ed, even if there's no understanding of the resaons - again, as in this op-ed. A well-run bus system operated by the school system will always be less expensive than one run by for-profit companies. More important, a well run system that pays its drivers a wage commenserate with the skills required will attract the drivers that parents and their children deserve.

This fiasco is a consequence of privatizing the school bus system. The Board of Education used to own the buses and provide the service but then they sold the buses to private contractors. These contractors have the BOE over a barrel.

Perhaps if every neighborhood had good schools busing would not be needed.

My sister (former teacher) drives a bus in upstate in a small lake(s) community where she delivered a teen to her scheduled route (grandmother) she saw the girl turn and run down the road. She then turned the bus around to “find her” ... not an easy task in the bluffs of the finger lakes... the girl didn’t want to stay with her grandmother, but ran a mile into town to her other grandmother... the teen told her mom that the bus driver just let her off at the wrong house and the mom got on Facebook and admonished my sister for just dropping the teen off in the middle of nowhere... making my sister out as not responsible,,, when in fact, she went out of her way to help this girl... luckily, there was a bus monitor and camera that honorated my sister... the kid lied! My sister loves and takes care of her charges...

We live outside the fable 5 boroughs and must pay for our kids to get a metro card and yet we pay a commuters tax to the MTA. How about fighting for our kids also?

Until we as a nation are willing to pay for the services we expect, we will not get them. Public education is a service provider and the people who provide the services, whether employed by a school district or a contractor, expect to be paid and expect certain benefits such as health care. These people are our neighbors, friends, families. And, yes, I know. It is not simply a matter of throwing money at a problem. But if we want better training, GPS connectivity, more buses, more efficient routing, better maintenance of equipment, etc., we have to recognize that there are cost factors involved. But who is willing to run for office on the platform that we should pay more taxes? Every candidate for local, state or national office is unwilling to speak frankly about the cost factors involved. And we as their constituents are willing enough to say fix these problems, but don't ask us to pay for the solutions. Is there waste in government? Yes. Should we have different spending priorities? Probably. But our national aversion to being taxed is limiting our ability to even discuss meaningful responses to the legitimate concerns raised in the article and in these thoughtful comments.

Need stats on how many K-8 grade students use buses. And the reasons why. Can this number be reduced? Why can't neighborhood schools serve their communities?

Shocking. Immediate action must be taken to ensure bus safety for any bus rider, which includes functioning seat belts, proper bus maintenance, hiring of excellent drivers (proper licenses, lifetime background checks, health, etc.), limit of driving hours to avoid fatigue, cameras on board, and training for how to handle child emergencies. Even one breach, one instance of texting, incivility, inattention, drinking, etc. which may adversely affect passenger safety, must result in immediate loss of the right to drive our children, our family or any of us. No excuses. Lives do depend on fail safe and sound rules for every bus driver and bus.

Why do so many students need bus service? Distances in NYC are short and schools are spread out. When I was a child in NY years ago I walked to school for the first few grades; by the time I switched to a school further away I was old enough to take public transit.

I am a parent of two autistic children who rely on busing to get to their specialized school. I’ve had a matron who was too rough with one my sons due to lack of training (he was terrified of her). I’ve had chronic lateness issues (getting to school 30-60 minutes late for months). People posting here my not realize that students with IEPs are often not able to get an appropriate placement in their community school. This is a problem that disproportionately affects our most vulnerable students—disabled children. Busing should not be so stressful and so scary. It should not be something that keeps me up at night.

My son is now 24, and so no longer in special ed, but we saw similar problems in NJ. Our school district was very responsive to issues on the bus, but that did not help us when, on the first day of a new route, he was not home by 5, 5:30 6pm. There is no one to call. The transportation companies close at 4. The Morris County transportation coordinators also close at 4. By evening the schools are closed and that leaves the police - who have no way of tracking down the bus. This is insane! When you have a non-verbal child, who cannot advocate for themselves or even call home, it is truly terrifying. Needs to change.

My son is 7 and has Autism. He is verbal with a limited time travel accommodation. Rather than see the importance of busing in a child's school day, OPT sees this process as a contract. I have seen OPT change good bus companies in from June to July because some bus companies will take cheaper contracts. I have seen these bus companies pull over and wait with children who are non verbal until my child's 1 hour time travel will begin. They are doing this in order to avoid a fine and are guessing the kids cant tell. I have seen OPT give bus routes to drivers who do not know NYC (Manhattan proper). I have had my child forgotten to be picked up at school and brought home late. I have had my child describe to me what a u turn is only to find out the bus driver was making them. I have also seen OPT managers who are trying their best to fix the situation and keep our children save. And, I have also seen caring and wonderful drivers and matrons as well as families come together to inform each other of bus situations. It is insulting that the NYC DOE has not utilized or created a system to track buses and children or created a better system. It is sad that instead of looking at the system and the children's success form taking the bus, they are looking at contract start and end dates. Children especially on special ed buses need consistency and safety and the system does not allow for that.

Busing is big business in NYC and a profit point for private religious schools. It is also a tremendous waste of money. Most NYC children can walk to their local school. It is time we stop wasting money on busing and put the money into the classroom. People who support our current budget for busing either haven't studied it or are gaining economic advantage from the waste. Even if you are a dependent of society and pay no taxes, busing is a wasteful expenditure which could be exchanged for a more useful expenditure.

Meanwhile, children who live in New York City and attend private schools also get free busing provided by the city. You can be certain those buses aren't going astray and dropping kids off at the wrong schools. It horrifies me that the most vulnerable children in our city, once again, take the back seat (literally) to kids from enormously privileged families.

As a former Assistant Principal in a K-8 school in the Bronx, I can say busing always had its issues. First, at the end of the day, busing students always had to leave class early to go downstairs to the "busing" room. The end of the day in a classroom is wrap up time - check homework, desk, backpack, etc ... confer with teacher on any issue related to the day. If a few students from the class have to leave early, the teacher has to start this routine early which means the last period is shortened for all of the students. Second, the need for well qualified bus drivers and their assistants. This article points to this fact. Many of these people are not qualified to handle students with a variety of needs. They are not trained in de-escalation techniques or even basic management. This creates a safety issue on the bus and also an unhealthy environment (bullying).

Delivering a child to the wrong school is child neglect. When parents do things like this, social services shows up. Shaving a half hour a day off child's school day is a loss of 90 hours - more than 2 weeks - of education: a theft of services. That it could continue simply means that assuring equal access to an education, and the protection in loco parentis of children is not a priority in NYC schools, and that budgetary issues are. Change the stakes - if the school system management has to answer legally for child neglect and financially for theft of services, perhaps they'd prioritize the children, for no other reason than to save their own keisters.

FL (initially under Jeb Bush) implemented a well regarded system of virtual school full, part time and course options. Within a given school year, upwards of 20,000 full and part time students take classes at home. This option in NYC would reduce the transportation requirements on the system and offer choices to parents.

So a bunch of totally incompetent twits must immediately become capable and responsible, because the City Council orders them to do so. I am waiting to see how this works out....

As a former urban public school administrator, urban PTA president and parent of 3 who graduated from St. Paul Public Schools, I've learned that a well run transportation system was not just important, it was crucial! Some of NYC's best logistic experts must be asked to work on and solve this.

I'm glad someone is calling attention to this problem! At the school where I teach, one boy's bus dropped him off at 7 a.m. last year; school starts at 8:40. He would doze off in the school office until start time. This was obviously just one of the more minor failings of the system, compared to those described in the article.