District officials attributed the improvements partly to a new policy that removes students from the roster of bus riders if they have not ridden the bus for more than two weeks without notifying the schools first, according to a report on the effectiveness of school transportation released Wednesday.
More than 1,000 students have opted out to date, decreasing the total number of necessary morning bus stops across the city by about 400. Officials expect another 1,000 or so students to opt out in the near future.
“It makes the routes shorter, it makes them more efficient,” Superintendent Mary Skipper said during a roundtable discussion with Boston Public Schools (BPS) families at the Rafael Hernandez School in Roxbury Wednesday morning. “We’re not waiting at the bus stop for students that aren’t coming.”
BPS transports more than 22,000 students to more than 200 public, charter and private schools daily. This requires about 640 buses on the road for about 1,500 runs each in the morning and afternoon.
On the first day of school for the 2024-2025 school year, more than two-thirds of buses arrived late. Mayor Michelle Wu said at the time that the delays were due to drivers getting used to the district’s new bus tracking app, Zūm, which allows parents to see where their student’s bus is and gives them live estimates for pick-up and drop-off times.
Arrival times have improved significantly since then and the software has allowed the district, for the first time, to collect real-time data on every bus route. Previously, routes were mapped out on paper, and staff checked names off of a roster manually if student ridership was tracked at all.
With the new data, the district has been able to continuously update routes throughout the year to make them more efficient.
“We now have a system that is on its way to being fully modernized and accountable to families,” Wu said.
The data also helps officials identify the students who can be removed from bus routes. These students’ families are contacted before they are opted out, and can restart their bus service at any time if needed.
This change will save the district close to $1 million, Skipper said.
Other improvements BPS has made, including new vendor and labor contracts and addressing previous staffing shortages, have also helped improve bus on-time performance, according to the report.
However, Skipper said more improvements are unlikely without additional structural changes to the school transportation system.
Under state law, BPS is required to transport all students in the city, including approximately 5,000 who go to charter or parochial schools, a number that has increased significantly in the last decade. Because these schools have students who live citywide, they spend about 22 percent longer on the bus than BPS students, on average.
In addition, while most BPS schools are aligned with one of three start time “tiers,” with the first bell of the day at 7:30 followed by 8:30 or 9:30 a.m., 18 of the non-BPS schools do not. Buses that serve those schools are, therefore, unable to do three runs each morning as the buses that serve BPS schools do.
Another challenge is a 38 percent rise in “door-to-door” student transportation over the last 10 years. This service is available for some students with special education needs and requires buses to drop them off directly at their home, rather than on a corner with other students in the neighborhood.
“Even though the number of students riding the bus has gone down over the last decade or so, the complexity, the number of stops, the level of need of our students ... that has increased substantially,” Wu said.
While parents who participated in Wednesday’s roundtable praised the improvements the city has made, they also made it clear that more work needed to be done.
A common complaint was that the Zūm app was great in theory, but in practice, it frequently gave them inaccurate information, or if their child forgot to check in, they wouldn’t show up as being on the bus at all.
“I’ll get, at 2:30 every day, like clockwork, ‘The bus is running late,’” said Shamieh Wall, whose daughter attends first grade at the Henderson Inclusion School.
However, a few minutes later, she always gets a follow-up message saying the bus is running on time. While she’s used to the double messages now, she said she used to “freak out,” thinking she had to go to the school to pick up her daughter right away.
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