For three straight mornings this week, ESUMS students waited more than a half hour for the school bus to arrive — while their parents were left in the dark about what was up.
The reason: a combination of the shortage of school bus drivers and a glitch in communications.
The public schools have been hustling to fill gaps in routes because of the shortage of drivers during the pandemic. Officials have combined routes to make sure all kids are covered.
On Monday, a driver from First Student (the bus company contracted to ferry students) who covers a route for Engineering and Science University Magnet School (ESUMS) was out sick.
Parents didn’t receive word about that. The 30-plus kids showed up around 7 a.m. Monday at the stop at Alden Avenue and Woodbridge Avenue, and waited, and waited. A half hour later, with no word on whether a bus was coming, some parents swung into action and ferried groups of kids to school.
That happened again on Tuesday and Wednesday. Parents texted each other updates, but received no word from the school on what was happening.
They also tried using the school system’s new app designed to offer information on the status of bus routes. The app did not work.
“Even on a day when the bus does come, the GPS is actually way behind the actual location of the bus,” reported Evan Rosa, one of the parents who took kids to school after they waited at the bus stop.
“We all get five robocalls a day, it seems,” from the public schools, noted another affected parent, Mark Oppenheimer. Why, he asked, can’t the schools make calls to parents with information about delayed or canceled bus routes?
As it turned out, the morning bus did arrive at the stop, about 45 minutes late.
“The bus route was combined with other routes all three days, but the bus was very late. The app didn’t work because the routes had been combined,” schools spokesperson Justin Harmon informed the Independent. “There was a miscommunication between the school and the transportation office about the notification to parents, and unfortunately the parents were not informed as they should have been.”
He said that drivers on “roughly 5 percent” of routes are running late on a given day, but usually only by a few minutes.
“Normally we communicate better. We can only apologize to the parents involved in this instance,” Harmon said.
Parent Rosa, meanwhile, saw an upside in the confusion: He got to spend some more time with his daughter, an ESUMS sixth-grader, and some of her friends when he piled a bunch of kids in his van to take them to school.
” It reminded me of the carpool I had a kid,” he said. “I like being connected to my daughter’s friends. I love this age.”