After school bus difficulties meant about 10,000 students in Prince George’s County Public Schools in Maryland had trouble getting to and from school, if the bus even came at all, leaders in the school system are trying to offer up promises that things will get better. It’s just not clear if any progress was made on the second day of school.
In a statement issued Wednesday morning, the school system said most of the 74,000 students who rely on buses to get to and from school had no troubles, but also acknowledged that doesn’t matter too much to those who did have problems.
“Yesterday … we got to the bus stop around 20 minutes early because last year the bus came early, so we thought we’d be there extra early, and we waited until 9:15. The bus was supposed to come at 8:53,” said Meghan Sommers of Laurel, who ended up driving her son to his school in Lanham. “He did get home on the afternoon bus, so that was nice. And then this morning we waited for an hour past the time the bus was supposed to come because I wanted to make sure that it just wasn’t very late. But when we got to the school, the school administrator said that the bus did arrive at the school, so it must have just skipped our stop.”
The county also admitted the Chipmunk app used by parents to track buses kept crashing, but that things were up and running correctly by midday Tuesday. On Wednesday, parents did take to social media to complain about inconsistent functionality again.
“I could log in and it would, for a brief second, show my son’s bus as being in the Laurel bus lot and then switch to being ‘bus not reporting,’” said Sommers. “So most of the time when I check it, it says bus not reporting, and it was the same yesterday for both the morning and afternoon bus.”
The school system won’t make leaders available for interviews again until Friday, but on Tuesday morning Superintendent Shawn Joseph was asked about potential problems with buses, and seemed confident things would go well, but not perfectly.
“The first week of school, it always is an adjustment period, but we are going to be determined to make sure we resolve any issues that occur quickly,” Joseph said, adding that before the day started that the school system wasn’t anticipating seeing the kind of delays that students ultimately experienced.
However he did say students in one part of the county could be impacted by a shortage of bus drivers.
“The good news is we’re only down about 41 bus drivers this year, out of 1,100,” Joseph said. “There’s one bus lot — the Fairmount bus lot — that had the most vacancies …. If there’s going to be issues it’ll probably come out of that Fairmount bus lot but.”
He also said before the day started that the school system wasn’t anticipating seeing the kind of delays that students ultimately experienced. However, he did say students in one part of the county could be impacted by a shortage of bus drivers.
“The good news is we’re only down about 41 bus drivers this year, out of 1,100,” he said. “There’s one bus lot — the Fairmount bus lot — that had the most vacancies. If there’s going to be issues it’ll probably come out of that Fairmount bus lot.”
On the second day of school, the county said it wasn’t willing to provide a deadline that guaranteed improvements to families if it wasn’t confident it could meet it. A spokeswoman said the school system’s transportation team is still working on routing to help bring about improvements and reduce travel times. For now though, the county is only saying transportation delays can be expected and bus routes could be further adjusted as enrollment stabilizes.
“It has been pretty frustrating,” said Sommers. “I am privileged in that I am a stay-at-home mom, so I was able to drive him to school this morning. I know that there are a lot of parents that are in more difficult situations and don’t have the ability to get to their kids and get them to school.”
On top of that, she said she spent 40 minutes on hold Wednesday afternoon waiting for answers from someone at the bus lot, but was told that if there’s a problem with a morning bus, the time to call is in the morning.
“I talked to my son’s school, and they said they are going to try to get a hold of transportation,” she said. Otherwise, she’s not getting much in the way of answers.
“Our goal is not to simply ask families to accept delays. Our goal is to reduce them each day,” the statement said. The county wasn’t able to say on Wednesday if that had happened yet.
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