Christopher Peak Photos
Transit chief Fred Till faces crowd Wednesday night. Below: Jasmine Reed, who lost her job responding to daughter’s bus change.
Officials are now dealing with thousands of complaints about last-minute school-bus route changes — and might not get through the backlog until month’s end.
Outraged parents reported going into personal debt or, in one case, losing a job trying to get their kids to school.
Supervisors from the school district’s transportation department and the First Student bus company gave that update at Wednesday night’s special Board of Education meeting at Celentano School.
This summer, school officials scrapped all existing bus routes and told First Student to draw more efficient ones. By making students walk farther — up to half a mile, or even longer for certain high schoolers — they eliminated close to half the bus stops, saving $3.8 million.
But they waited until the last week of summer break to let parents know about the changes.
When parents finally found out, the wheels came spinning off. Some had to send their kids across busy intersections or by liquor stores. Some had medical conditions that weren’t considered in changed routes. Some weren’t told anything at all. Parents came by the hundreds to the district’s headquarters for answers.
School officials said last week that they were trying to resolve all the 900 complaints they’d received by this Monday, Sept. 9. But at Wednesday night’s meeting, they said they’ve gotten even more requests for changes — up to 1,500 — and need more time to finish. That’s on top of another 1,500 changes that have been sitting in the bus company’s offices for two weeks.
They said that they plan to roll out whatever changes they can enter weekly until Monday, Sept. 30. That has left some parents worrying that will cascade into even more issues as routes that they thought were set continue to shift, while officials have tried to assure them that this overhaul will ultimately create “a better, more productive and safer system for everybody,” as Fred Till, the district’s transportation director, put it.
Darnell Goldson: Another month of this is unacceptable.
But board members said that a month-long delay is “unacceptable.” They’ve heard parents say they’re missing work. They’ve heard schools reporting more than a tenth of their kids aren’t showing up. And they’ve heard officials give shifting explanations for what went wrong each week.
“I’ve had some very frustrating moments on the board, but nothing like this,” said Darnell Goldson, the board’s president. “ “Every time you guys get up to the mic, it’s a different story. If your numbers keep changing, that means you didn’t have a grasp on this when you first started. That’s very frustrating to me, because these are people’s lives. I just don’t understand this.”
Wednesday night’s meeting took place amid a precarious start to Superintendent Carol Birks’s second school year, just as the board prepares to grade her for the first time in a formal evaluation.
Birks arrived at the board meeting hours after furious parents shouted her down at another transportation forum at Fair Haven School. Parents have also been complaining that most Hillhouse High School students were told the wrong first day of school. And the human resources department still hasn’t filled 28 teaching vacancies after a wave of summer resignations.
BOE’s Tamiko Jackson-McArthur solicits questions from the audience.
First Student’s Paul Demaio: Tired of listening to complaints.
At Wednesday’s meeting, Michael Pinto, the district’s chief operating officer, said that the transportation department had received roughly 1,500 requests and inquiries from parents, of which 1,150 are still outstanding. He added that the district has already denied 266 requests for having “no valid reason to change the stop.”
Pinto said most of the remaining complaints — 492 cases — have been about how far students have to walk, along with 292 safety concerns, 233 general requests for information,104 medical accommodations, and 100 address changes. He said that the district will process as many of those requests as it can each week, before sending an update to First Student to roll out each coming Monday.
“We are adding additional staff,” Pinto said. “However, it is a tedious task to go through these and vet each one. We have a large backlog and we are working as quickly as we possibly can to get them to First Student to be processed.”
Paul Demaio, the senior manager at First Student, said it had another 1,500 requests in its backlog too. Those had all been uploaded to the school district’s PowerSchool system since Aug. 26, but the company said it hadn’t realized it should’ve processed them for this week’s rerouting.
Some of those requests will be repeats from the district’s backlog, he said. Those should all be current by next week, he added.
“We didn’t think anybody was using [PowerSchool] to update, which may be some of this problem,” Demaio explained. “They were in the queue to go up live on Monday, but then the manual processing came in play, with all the faxes, emails and other changes that became more urgent, overrode that.”
Demaio added that First Student had hired five additional people to the routing team in the last two weeks to help with future updates.
He said that the company hadn’t hired more people to answer the phones because parents “should be calling the board and not us or spend[ing] a significant amount of time telling us negative things and not wanting to let us off the phone, [so] we can’t get to the next person..”
Tamiko Jackson-McArthur, the board’s secretary, called that comment “offensive” to parents like her who’ve called in “terror.”
Asked whether the company had advised the district not to go ahead with the rerouting, Demaio said, “There were some words of cautioning.”
Parents, like Elizabeth Coleman, at right, came looking for answers.
When it came time for public comment, parents said that the busing changes have disrupted their lives.
Elizabeth Coleman, who showed up in her gray Yale University janitorial uniform, said she’d been spending $50 a week to get her son to Eli Whitney Technical High School in Hamden after his bus never came, because he’s supposed to walk the 1.3 miles there down Fitch Street.
“I’m a single parent, and my son’s education means a lot to me. Now I’m putting myself into debt for my son to go to school,” she said. “Whatever y’all did last year, you need to put it back.”
Rayshan Coleman said he’d had to “knock somebody out” for stalking his seventh-grade daughter, who now gets picked up in front of a package store, where the bus has sometimes been an hour late.
Sadie Marshall said that First Student threatened to call the police when she went to ask why only two people were answering the company’s phones, after no one has been there to pick up her daughter, who is partially blind.
And another mom, Jasmine Reed, said all the transportation troubles had even caused her to lose a job, after she’d repeatedly shown up late.
Reed: This district needs to do better.
This month, Reed moved from across the city, from Fair Haven to Westville. She’d given the district a copy of her lease five days in advance, she said, because “I try to get a ball on stuff.”
But First Student never logged her family’s new address. Reed found that out when her 6‑year-old son, who is severely autistic, was driven to her old address, then brought back to Strong School because she was marked as a “no show.” He had what she called “a severe meltdown” that trashed the principal’s office.
Since then, Reed has had to drop her son off at the elementary school in the Hill every morning. And after showing up late three times to her job at a Fair Haven deli, her boss said he needed to let her go.
Reed feels especially upset, because she says her son should have had the door-to-door accommodations he needs in place already. She said he keeps pressing the bus symbol on his Proloquo communication app, because he knows the routine isn’t right. She said she hates to see him “suffering.”
“The district needs to do a better job of getting into contact with parents about these things going on,” Reed said. “We have to do something to protect our kids.”
My heart breaks for Jasmine Reed. This chaos is completely unacceptable. If this isn't a sign that things need to change in New Haven, I'm not sure what is. Carol Birks has got to go!