NHPS
New Haven Public Schools (NHPS) has again tapped First Student as its transportation contractor for the next four years, after searching in vain for two months for a competing bid.
The Board of Education voted to approve the new contract Monday night at a regular hybrid meeting held in person at Ross Woodward School and online via Zoom.
The Board’s 6 – 0 approval for the recommended contractor came after the public school district spent the last year redoing its transportation bidding process due to concerns that the initial bid recommendation, provided last May, was a last-minute process. Critics argued the district didn’t take advantage of an opportunity to split the bus contract into two: one for out-of-town special education buses, and the other for in-town conventional and special education buses.
This year’s approved contract is a four-year contract with First Student for all busing priced at a total of $124,856,051.32, lasting from 2024 – 2028. With an option of adding on two additional fiscal years. The Request For Proposal (RFP) was posted Dec. 26, 2023, and closed Feb. 6, 2024.
This was more than two full months earlier than last year’s RFP. Click here to read the full memo provided by Chief Operating Officer Thomas Lamb.
NHPS’s one-year contract extension with First Student will end on June 30, 2024. That extension came as a result of the majority of the Board not approving last spring’s recommended contract.
The failed May 2023 bus contract recommendation would have awarded the NHPS transportation contract for both its regular and special education services to First Student starting on July 1, 2023, and run through June 30, 2026. The proposed three-year contract was for $93,646,128.58 with an option of adding on two additional years.
Lamb added that the RFP documents were downloaded by more than 30 individual contractors like First Student, We Transportation, and Zum Inc. out of California, which was recently awarded the transportation contract for Branford schools. They all submitted intent to provide proposals. On Feb. 6, We Transportation provided NHPS with a letter stating that they would not be submitting a proposal “but would be interested in the future RFP’s.”
This time around, Lamb worked with Superintendent Madeline Negrón,city Budget Director Mike Gormany, Paul Wessel from the Greater New Haven Clean Cities, and Steve Winter, among other officials, to draft the new RFP. The team decided that splitting the contract into segments would create “operational challenges at the school level as well as challenges for parents of children who may be placed on different buses,” according to a memo provided to the board Monday.
NHPS also added bus electrification requirements for bidders requesting that the contractor provide a plan for electrification of the fleet by 2030 within six months of the contract start date.
The memo continues: “The intent of the plan is to identify a pathway for the district to have a fully electrified fleet of more than 340 buses by 2030 to be in compliance with State and Federal mandates as well as the NHPS Climate Resolutions approved by the Board of Education.”
In January, First Student applied for 25 electric buses through the EPA Clean Air Act Funding on behalf of NHPS. The grant award has not been announced but Lamb’s memo said a development plan for the grant funding, if awarded, will begin as soon as the contract is in place.
The new RFP also had written into it that the purchase of fuel for transportation services under the new contract will be 100% provided by the city.
During the past RFP process NHPS did solicit multiple bids, bringing the district’s transportation team to consider competition for its bus service contract for the first time in years. Officials at NHPS and consulting group Bonfire ultimately made a unanimous choice to recommend First Student.
The First Student contract increase is partly due to required CDL Driver Wage Scale increases over the next few years.
NHPS plans to present the board-approved contract recommendation to the Board of Alders for final approval in April and May.
I'll ask a dumb question since I really have no clue. Since NHPS won't forgo bus transportation and move to a neighborhood school policy where many/most students might be able to walk to school, and the price tag over the years of the transportation contract ($124,856,051.32) is a lot of money, would NHPS be better off (or not) just purchasing its own buses?