2009-10-02 School Bus Chaos

Indian Prairie School District families faced big changes related to bus scheduling when school started this year. People complaining about bus issues were not overreacting to the usual glitches that come with the start of a new school year. The problems this year were on a whole different scale than we’ve ever seen before.

Hundreds, maybe thousands, of families faced very serious bus issues. Thankfully most have been resolved at this point. However there were entire neighborhoods that either had no bus service at all initially, or had buses so overcrowded that the drivers wound up not able to finish their routes once they had all seats full and some students standing in the aisles. Some students called for rides after school because once their assigned bus was full and no more students were allowed to board, they needed to find an alternate way to get home. Some had very long waits for very late buses as drivers did the best they could with the routes they’d been assigned.

Half day kindergarten students had a whole different array of bus problems – no bus scheduled to transport them at all, then a bus with an impossible schedule including pick-up times after the start of their school day, then no bus showing up to drive them home from school for more than an hour after their first day ended, and yet another day early in the year they were sent home on the wrong bus.

Minor bus issues included those cases were stops were so consolidated that now some bus stops had 30, 40, or even 50 kids waiting for the bus in a single location. Even as more buses and forgotten routes were added there continued to be reports of neighborhoods left behind, buses not able to fit all the of their assigned route, and large numbers of students at individual stops. The district office was inundated with more complaints than they could handle and worked to resolve the worst issues as quickly as possible.

This year the district added a new high school and converted a freshman campus to a middle school. In addition, the administration decided to purchase a bus routing system and move the bus routing in-house. The new system allowed each family to see information online about their own bus stop and pick-up and drop-off times, but did not give the complete route, as has been available in prior years. This meant that until the first day rolled around, parents didn’t know how completely crazy some of these routes were. In the first days after the information became available and school started routing changes were needed constantly.

Something particularly puzzling was the high school buses that had a hundred or more students assigned to them. These students were issued school IDs that included their bus numbers, so it seems that the district would have known some buses would be unable to transport the assigned number of students. Later I heard that the district underestimated the number of students who would ride the buses. There are always some students who have another mode of transportation and/or before and after school activities so do not use the buses on a regular basis.

One change that was to be implemented this year was the requirement that middle school and high school were to show an ID with the proper bus number on it in order to ride buses. As it turned out, many IDs had the wrong information to start with, or information that became wrong as routes were added or changed. Students from some neighborhoods had IDs incorrectly showing them as walkers. Because of the large number of issues, students have been riding the buses without showing IDs as they always have before, and I’ve heard of no incidents related to this.

I recently wrote about the district’s decision to assign bus seats for students in kindergarten through eighth grade, and my hopes that this decision would be revisited. I am happy to say that in light of all the other bus issues and changes, the district decided not to go forward with assigned seating for this school year. This can now still be used as a disciplinary measure when necessary.

Parents wondered why the district would take bus routing in-house on this particular year when there were already so many other changes going on. It turns out that no cost savings is realized with this change. The reason for taking routing in-house is that the district will be getting bids on a new bus contract to begin next school year. Whichever bus company the district contracts with in the future will use routes provided by the district. The district’s administration believes it can better manage the technology piece of the bus routing and that this is to the benefit of the residents, though we have yet to see evidence of that. The district says it can do better with customer service, better fit the district needs, and keep student and bus data in sync as student data gets to the Versa Trans system on a daily basis. The district attempted to better utilize full capacities on the buses as it tried to make do with the same number of buses as were used last year while busing to an additional building and adding students. They also apparently hoped to decrease bus route times by drastically reducing the number of stops.

I have the greatest respect and appreciation for our bus drivers and realize they have a difficult job, made even more so this year with the new routes. We can all hope that things will be better from here on out due to moving the scheduling in-house. Anyone still having bus issues should contact the district’s director of support services.