Birks Offers Bus Explanation

School buses this year are driving by more than half the places they used to stop, as the district eliminated nearly 4,500 pick-up points just before school started.

After a week of chaos — when hundreds of parents sat for hours at the district’s headquarters, jammed phone lines with sometimes dozens of calls each, and even volunteered to assist the district’s overwhelmed staff in logging requests — administrators described the extent of the transportation changes they’d made for the first time at Tuesday evening’s special Board of Education meeting.

As of this weekend, the district has received more than 900 requests to have a child’s stop changed, Superintendent Carol Birks said. So far, it has worked through just over half of the backlog, making close to 500 manual changes to the routes, she added. Those changes will take effect on Monday, Sept. 9.

Families whose kids have a new assignment — sometimes just a time adjustment of a few minutes later or earlier — should hear from their principal by Thursday and receive a postcard in the mail over the weekend, Birks said. Parents whose request for a change has been denied will receive a phone call, she added.

School board members said that the meeting was solely for informational purposes, and they did not take any votes on the issue. They told about 10 parents in attendance to come back next week to comment or wait to meet with an administrator after the meeting.

But they did ask tough questions about whether the proposal had been thoroughly vetted.

In the first overhaul since at least the early 2010s, administrators told the bus company, First Student, to throw out the old maps and start over in figuring out a new way to move around nearly 17,000 students, twice a day.

“We were stopping at every corner, safe or otherwise,” said Fred Till, the district’s in-house transportation director. ​“We were using an astronomical amount of vehicles, and the stops weren’t clustered.”

Under the new rules, students have to walk farther to get to school. if they live close to their school — 0.5 miles for Grades K‑8 and 1.5 miles for Grades 9 – 12 — they have to walk the whole way. If they are catching a bus, they have to walk up to 0.5 miles to the pick-up.

Those changes cut the number of stops almost by half, from roughly 8,800 last year to 4,546 this year, Till said.

(UPDATE: District officials initially reported there had been 11,000 bus stops last year, but they revised their figures at a subsequent board meeting, saying there had been only 8,800 bus stops last year.)

That move saved approximately $3.8 million, close to double what the district had expected to cut from the transportation budget to deal with this year’s deficit.

“This is not flawless,” Till said. ​“They will be adjusted, but it’s going to take some time in order to do that.” He added, ​“This is a starting point.”

But knowing there would be bumps along the way, why had the district waited so long to let anyone know what was happening? asked Darnell Goldson, the school board’s president.

“You guys have been talking about this since the beginning of the summer. You’ve been going to community meetings; you’ve been coming to the board and saying we’re going to change the rules,” he said. ​“I said to you at a meeting two months ago, ​‘Be ready. They’re going to storm this place when you start changing bus stops.’ We weren’t ready.”

Tamiko Jackson-McArthur, the school board’s secretary who said she’s been dropping off her kids at school, asked how administrators had considered the safety risks in deciding where kids should walk. She brought up multiple routes that she’d heard about from parents with safety concerns.

For instance, an 8‑year-old will have to walk 13 minutes, from Start Community Bank at the corner of Sherman & Whalley Avenues; past DeGale Field, Hillhouse High School and Orchard Wine & Liquors; to the bus stop at Dixwell Avenue & Henry Street.

“The problem is the terrain that we’re asking urban children to walk through,” Jackson-McArthur said. ​“They’re changing neighborhoods, which is very important to understand for some of them, and they’re crossing very busy streets.

“Saying that we’re working on it is not enough,” she added later. ​“I am, honestly, extremely nervous about something happening to someone’s child. This is dangerous. We have to fix this with haste.”

Birks said that most parents found out their bus assignments the week before school started because First Student didn’t start laying out routes until mid-July, in a process that takes about six weeks.

That’s because the district wanted to have most lottery placements and address changes close to finalized before the company started figuring out where to send kids, Birks explained.

The district was further delayed by technological problems, after a website hack required tech support to rebuild a server, she added.

Notices were finally mailed out just six days before the start of school, in keeping with what First Student said had been its past practice, Birks explained.

In retrospect, Birks admitted that just a week’s notice was cutting it too close for parents.

Going forward, the district will likely move its annual school lottery, which begins taking applications in February and placing students in April, earlier on the calendar, so that it can send the bus company attendance rosters earlier in the summer, she said.

Throughout the meeting, Birks apologized for the way the changes were sprung on parents. She said a transportation reroute had been talked about previously as part of her budget mitigation plans, but she admitted that administrators hadn’t given any ​“specific details” until last week.

“I want to apologize again to the community, regarding the routing of the buses and the way it was rolled out,” Birks said.

“We are still routing students now,” she added. ​“What parents are bringing to our attention, telling us this is not a safe place, we are making those changes as quickly as we can. Around the clock, people have been working really hard to make those changes.”