This story is part of WTOP’s 2026 Back to School coverage.
The superintendent of Prince George’s County Public Schools has acknowledged responsibility in the ongoing transportation crisis during the first week of the new school year, and is giving the Maryland school system the grade of “F” in how it has handled the rollout of a new bus tracking app.
During a Thursday School Board meeting, after hearing residents and bus drivers describe their frustration with bus delays and cancellations that have plagued the beginning of the semester, as well as problems with the new Chipmunk bus monitoring app, Superintendent Shawn Joseph said, “I agree with many of the speakers that this wasn’t just an app problem, it was a leadership failure, and I’ll own that.”
Bus drivers said they were handed run sheets that were impossible to execute — in some cases being expected to be in two places at the same time.
“As if I have access to a transporter from Star Trek,” driver Melissa Barringer said.
“How are we supposed to fulfill the mission of transportation, to transport students to school safely and on time, when the schedules themselves make that impossible — you have literally set us up to fail,” said Barringer.
Parents voiced their anger at the inconvenience.
“Transportation is not an extra service, transportation is part of education,” Carrie Weletz said. “If a student cannot reliably get to and from school, that student is being denied access to their education.”
Another parent, Lance Escher, said he was unable to see on the Chipmunk app when and where his child was supposed to board the bus. After many calls and emails, he was informed his child was supposed to be at the bus stop two hours before the opening bell at school.
“The doubling of bus ride durations has driven many parents to abandon the bus and drive their kids to and from school,” Escher said. “Parents are making sacrifices at their jobs, taking leave, working late or literally forgoing wages to drive their kids in, when they would much rather have their kids ride the bus.”
Failure ‘exposed weakness’
Joseph admitted the poor performance on day one of the school year “exposed weakness, not only in technology transition, but in staffing and oversight, the surge capacity and in our communication,”
The past few days have been spent trying to understand the scope and causes of the problem — Joseph said there were not enough schedulers to coordinate the routes of the second-largest school system in Maryland.
Joseph told the board that the system will “have 27 people working on getting us through this process, to get the backlog done. And the goal is by Saturday to have that backlog completed.”
However, Joseph acknowledged it will take time for the system to run effectively.
“Routing every student is just a first benchmark, it’s not a finish line. So, just because students are routed doesn’t mean the problem is going to be solved. Please hear me when I say I’m not saying that transportation problems will be done and corrected by Saturday, they will not,” Joseph said.
Once the situation is stabilized, Joseph vowed to build permanent staffing, supervision, vendor capacity, communications and contingency systems to keep the transportation system running smoothly.
“To me, success will be defined as reliable service,” Joseph said.
A representative from Chipmunk addressed the board and parents, “I want to apologize to the community of PGCPS — we did not provide the service that we hold ourselves to. We are all-hands-on-deck, and you have the commitment from myself and our whole organization that we will do what it takes to get it right for this community.”
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