Boston Mayor Michelle Wu says that, following a rocky transition to a new system, city school buses’ on-time rates are back to where they were last year, but some city councilors are asking for the state to intervene.
Two Boston City Council members say the morning pickup and afternoon drop off delays involving Boston school buses to start the school year have reached a breaking point, and they went before the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education on Tuesday to demand something be done about it. This after claiming their initial efforts went unnoticed.
City councilors Ed Flynn and Erin Murphy are asking DESE to conduct a thorough investigation into the root causes of these delays that really began on day one, when only about a third of buses made it to school on time.
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At that time, Boston Public Schools officials said delays are common in the first week of school. But two weeks later, the issue still persists.
"Just this morning, I got a call from a single mom where three weeks into school she still doesn't have a bus for her son," Murphy told DESE on Tuesday. "And when she gets the hotline to call at BPS, they're hanging up on her and not helping her. So it's not just the first few days to get the kinks out. We're into the third week and they're not willing to talk to us."
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The city councilors say the morning pickup issues are affecting as many as 14,500 students, and said they've heard stories in the afternoon of students not arriving home until 7 p.m.
Mayor Michelle Wu and school officials have said the delays are due in part to new technology and route changes due to an uptick in enrolled students.
We asked Wu about the issue Wednesday, and she said that buses' on-time rates have returned to where they were last year, which Boston Public Schools placed at 84%.
"The challenges with the bus system with our schools this year has been because we've been adopting a new technology and we had an influx of hundreds of new students, which was unusual at a very relatively late point in the year," she said.
Boston Public Schools said in a statement released Wednesday afternoon, "We are committed to continuously improving our OTP, and since the start of school have made weekly route adjustments with the help of the new Zum app to update route timings based on real-world traffic conditions, update bus assignments for any students with changes, and improve overall route efficiency."
