“I anticipated that it wouldn’t be great,” Chatfield, who works as a nurse at Beth Israel Deaconess, told me. “But over the last month in the media, the mayor has been touting how great things are going to be this year with this new system. So I had a little bit of hope.”
As the mother of three sons in the Boston Public Schools, Anne Chatfield has had her share of bad experiences with buses on the first day of school in past years. But she’s never had a bus not show up — until last Thursday.
It turned out to be short-lived. Not only did her youngest son’s morning bus never show up — he’s a fifth grader at the Murphy K-8 School in Dorchester, she said — but the afternoon bus was more than two hours late.
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“They had told me his school releases at 3:10 p.m. and the time BPS had quoted me was 3:55 p.m. that he would be home,” Chatfield said. This year, the district is using Zūm, an app that allows families to track their students’ buses by providing bus information on a live map. “And I watched the bus wander all throughout Dorchester, come into South Boston, go back to Dorchester, go back to South Boston, go back to Dorchester.” Her son was dropped off home at 5:36 p.m., she said.
The Chatfield family of South Boston shared a Zūm screenshot of their son’s two-hour bus ride home from the Murphy K-8 School in Dorchester on Thursday, Sept. 5, 2024, the Boston Public Schools’ first day of school. HANDOUT
Sadly, late buses have become a first-day-of-school tradition in Boston. For some parents, the day is marked by extreme frustration and disruption because of the seemingly intractable dysfunction of the district’s bus system. It begs the question: Why can’t the BPS figure out the perennial challenges it has to bus more than 20,000 students? Has the city become so inured to the district’s transportations struggles that they barely make news?
Multiple posts on social media provided a look into the problems some families went through with school buses on Thursday. And the data show it: According to the district, only 34 percent percent of buses were on time getting student to school in the morning of the first day. The rest were late: 62 percent arrived within 15 minutes of start time and 80 percent within 30 minutes. Last year, the first-day-of-school on-time arrival rate was 61 percent. As for the afternoon buses, 57 percent were on time on Thursday.
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“These delays that happen in the first days of school were largely expected due to drivers and bus monitors navigating new routes and greeting new faces for the first time, and the implementation of the new Zum technology that the majority of our bus drivers, families, and school-based staff were using in real-world conditions for the first time,” BPS Superintendent Mary Skipper said in a statement. “We saw a significant day-over day improvement in OTP [on-time performance] on Friday, which put us on track with our first day of school last year.”
Lest we forget, the city’s school system signed an improvement plan with state education authorities two years ago that, among other goals, states that BPS buses ought to achieve a districtwide on-time arrival rate of 95 percent or better each month. My Globe colleague James Vaznis reported last week that, in the past school year, “the highest monthly average BPS achieved was 90 percent in March.”
Chatfield’s son, while on the lost bus that afternoon last week, was texting her that the driver didn’t seem to know where he was going, she said. There were apparently four students on the bus the whole time, she said. “At one point, I considered calling the police to ask them to pull the bus over so that I could get my child off of it because I was scared,” Chatfield said.
Chatfield said her husband, Patrick, called the district to raise alarm bells about his son’s bus but could not get anyone on the phone. Her husband said on social media that he understands how bad the traffic has gotten in Boston but having drivers seemingly unaware of where they’re going is unacceptable and frightening. (On Sunday, the Chatfields received an email from Dan Rosengard, the executive director of transportation for the district, apologizing for the challenges the family went through.)
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Chatfield reached out to District 2 City Councilor Ed Flynn, who told me in an interview that he and his office heard complaints from 12 to 15 families about school transportation issues on Thursday. It prompted him to send a letter to Skipper on Friday. “A parent mentioned they drove their child from Hyde Park to a school in the South End because their bus did not arrive,” he wrote. Flynn is also filing a motion to hold a City Council hearing to discuss what happened with school buses the first week of school.
“I would like to hear directly from BPS professionals on what happened,” Flynn said. “I don’t necessarily want to place the blame. I just want to figure out how we don’t make this mistake all of the time. … I wouldn’t say they’re not concerned with the students. I just think they were overwhelmed. The [transportation] plan was poorly implemented.”
To be sure, the district did make a much-needed move toward transparency by signing a three-year contract with Zūm, the app that allows families to track their students’ buses. This has provided families with peace of mind regarding the whereabouts of their children — or, as in the case of the Chatfield family, anxiety when things go wrong, giving a rare view into how dysfunctional the system can get.
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As for accountability, or lack thereof, Chatfield said the bus driver who dropped off her son more than two hours late on Thursday refused to tell her his name. Friday and Monday mornings bus pickups went smoothly, she said. On Sunday, the Chatfields received an email from Dan Rosengard, the executive director of transportation for the district, apologizing for the challenges the family went through. But she’s still apprehensive about the afternoon route (the family made plans to pick up their son from school on Friday).
Meanwhile, Mayor Michelle Wu, when announcing the rollout of the new bus tracking app last month, said in a press release: “We have heard from parents and caregivers that there has to be more information and better communication when it comes to transportation.” But transparency without accountability is virtually meaningless. “I don’t want you to come to my school and hand my kid a pencil,” Chatfield said about Wu’s first-day-of-school photo op. Indeed, parents want answers and won’t be afraid to hold officials responsible for their actions.
Marcela García is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at marcela.garcia@globe.com. Follow her on X @marcela_elisa and on Instagram @marcela_elisa.