Long way to go before parents can trust Columbus City Schools bus plan | Theodore Decker
Melissa Flores hasn't trusted the Columbus City Schools' broken busing system since her fourth-grade son disappeared into the South Side ether for a full two hours one afternoon in late August.
"Ever since the day that the incident happened, I have not put my son back on the bus," she said last week.
The "incident" was of the sort scoured from the acid pit of any parent's stomach.
On Aug. 31, her son boarded his bus at 3:30 p.m. at Southwood Elementary for the ride home. His driver missed his stop, and the boy didn't turn up until 6:10 p.m.
But the worst of it, Flores said, was the cavalier way the district's transportation department treated her demands for answers.
"It was a good two hours that I didn't know where he was, and they couldn't tell me where he was," she told me. "I would have been calmer about the situation if they were able to say, 'Hey, she's new and missed his stop.'"
Instead, she was told the bus garage couldn't reach the driver and their location was unknown.
"They were so matter-of-fact about it," she said. "I ended up calling the police. I didn't know what else to do."
"I try not to be one of those paranoid people but for two hours I didn't know where my kid was," she said.
Since then, Flores has reworked her morning schedule and driven her son to school every day.
She's fortunate that she has a car and lives close enough to the school that the extra gas isn't an undue burden. But she wonders what has happened with so many other families who aren't as fortunate, who may not have the flexibility, resources or both to do the same.
Beset by complaints like hers since the start of the school year, the district is pledging to make major changes. Included, officials say, will be a complete overhaul of bus routes set to begin when students return to school after the holiday break on Jan. 3. Students and parents will be told of the specific changes before the end of this month.
"We are really confident in the short-term fix to ensure that everybody that needs transportation gets it, gets to school on time, so that they have great academic success the rest of the year," Columbus City School Board President Jennifer Adair said.
Columbus City Schools officials have offered a range of excuses for the rash of failed pickups, missed drop-offs and late arrivals, including a nationwide shortage of drivers and problems with a $1.5-million software system that was supposed to make this whole operation more efficient.
More of your money well spent.
Other districts, to be fair, have struggled with similar issues since in-person schooling resumed following COVID-19, primarily in the form of driver shortages that have forced occasional returns to remote learning.
More:Greater Columbus school districts say they have enough bus drivers, but some issues remain
But CCS is the state's largest school district, with 47,000 students. Many of them, along with students who attend charter and nonpublic schools, are among the estimated 38,000 who depend on the district's bus transportation. Rebuilding a network that size from the ground up, and doing it mid-year, is a promise this lumbering beast of a district may not be able to keep. Not that the status quo is an option, either.
"If they could demonstrate that they have GPS and open lines of communication with the drivers, I would trust it again," Flores said.
Although she hasn't put her son on a bus since that day in August, she has her suspicions that problems with his route have persisted well into the fall.
Flores suspects this because several times since then, on her way back from the school, she has passed a boy who looks to be a little older than her son. She doesn't know him, his parents or their particular circumstances, but she does know that the bus is supposed to pick him up at 8:20 a.m. And he has seen him a few times now, alone, walking away from the bus stop at 8:45.
She assumes he was heading home, and she has started to wonder if there was anybody there to greet him or to take him to school.
"He could be standing out there, in freezing weather now, for a good 30 minutes, and then be potentially home alone," she said. "These are small children. This isn't like major-city transportation with adults."
In the midst of all this bad busing news, there was another story to come out of the school district last week.
This one was a bright spot. In partnership with United Way of Central Ohio, the district handed out 2,300 new winter jackets for all students at six of the district's most needy elementary schools.
It's a nice program, and desperately needed. Maybe even more so as we head into the height of winter and this unresolved busing state-of-affairs.
"This year it's just a complete and total mess," Flores said of the transportation problems. "If it was a politician's kid, you can bet it would be fixed in a minute."
Theodore Decker is the Dispatch metro columnist.
tdecker@dispatch.com
@Theodore_Decker
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Columbus: Columbus City Schools busing mess leaves parents in lurch
