State leaders remain silent on BPS's late bus crisis

Since Riley resigned in March, few seem willing to apply that standard. Neither the governor nor the state Legislature’s two education co-chairs responded to requests for comment Wednesday.

The district has struggled to get to school on time since the new school year began Sept. 5, with two-thirds of buses arriving late on the first day, the worst performance in at least nine years.

The 2022 agreement requires the district to ensure that 95% of buses arrive at school before the school bell and that 99% of buses arrive no more than 15 minutes late, two standards the district failed to meet last year and has yet to meet this year.

So far, none of those goals appear to be met. Wu’s short-term goal is to have 95 percent of buses arrive at school less than 15 minutes late, she said Wednesday morning.

“Our stated goal is to get every student to school on time,” she said. at a press conference. “What we saw in the data over the last year is that punctuality within 15 minutes of the bell ringing was pretty consistent above 95 percent, and we want to at least maintain that performance.”

Last year, 98% of the district’s buses arrived within that time slot, she said in a Monday night newsletter. But the BPS tracks on-time performance in two different ways. That figure reflects only buses that have GPS tracking data. A separate data set includes buses without GPS data, classifying all of them as late and lowering the on-time rate. The BPS agreed to report that latter set of figures to the state after a high percentage of routes at the start of the 2022-23 school year were found to be missing GPS data.

According to a memo the BPS sent to the state last year, under stricter criteria, 95.6 percent of buses arrived within 15 minutes, while 87.7 percent arrived on time.

Wu’s comments Wednesday came after she, Superintendent Mary Skipper and other city and district officials took a school bus to Higginson-Lewis K-8 School in Roxbury. The bus arrived at the school at 9:36 a.m., six minutes late. However, the bus wasn’t as late as before, stopping at the school an average of 15 to 20 minutes late.

Wu attributed the bus problems to two causes: the learning curve of a new GPS tracking app, Zūm, and an increase in late registrations.

Late registrations cause delays because, under the union’s transportation contract, the district reserves its routes for bus drivers to bid on Aug. 9, before drivers do their testing. But the addition of nearly 3,000 new student transportation requests since that date has required changing nearly two-thirds of the bus routes. That’s double the changes the district had to make last year, Wu said.

Transportation issues have drawn widespread criticism from parents, education advocates, city officials and, most recently, the Massachusetts Republican Party.

“There is no excuse for bus delays, especially after an entire summer of preparing for this fundamental responsibility of the school system,” MassGOP Chairwoman Amy Carnevale said in a statement Wednesday. “Working parents must be able to count on schools to get their children home on time, because even an hour of delay can disrupt work schedules, with potentially serious consequences for their families.”

Last Thursday, Boston City Councilors Edward Flynn and Erin Murphy asked the state to investigate the district’s transportation system. They then sent a letter to Skipper Wednesday, reiterating the plan’s standards and asking the district to hold itself accountable. Murphy said in an interview Wednesday that state Board of Education Chairwoman Katherine Craven invited her and Flynn to speak at a public meeting. The board of directors provided its comments at its meeting on Tuesday. However, the board did not add the issue to its agenda.

The board had little say in the state improvement plan, which did not require its approval. Then-Commissioner Riley appears to have been the driving force behind the deal, commissioning two state assessments of the district. He, too, declined to comment Wednesday.

And the state’s biggest leverage over the district — the ability to take it over — may no longer be available. Only districts in the bottom 10 percent of the state can be placed in receivership. And while the state doesn’t publish percentile rankings for districts, Skipper noted last month that the district is no longer in the bottom 10 percent of the state. performance on the state’s MCAS exam. The state classifies Boston schools as “not requiring assistance or intervention.”

Journalist James Vaznis contributed to this report.

You can contact Christopher Huffaker at [email protected]. Follow him @huffakingit.