By KIT SLACK
Photo credit: Juliette Fradin photography
Aug. 26, the first day of school, a 5-year-old in an orange vest waited at a bus stop in Hyattsville with his family. Ten minutes passed. Then twenty. His dad was proud of his new kindergartner’s patience. An hour and 40 minutes later, the dad gave up and drove his child to school.
Other families waited in cars outside Northwestern High School, though more than 70% of Northwestern’s 2,500 students qualify for bus transportation, according to school data. When buses don’t come, parents trying to get their kids to school wait in standstill traffic.
Still not enough drivers
Prince George’s County Public Schools (PGCPS) has attributed problems with transportation to a national bus driver shortage. That shortage continues in the county this year, with about 200 vacancies, similar to last year.
PGCPS hired 50 of its current 860 bus drivers since last October, according to Kristi Murphy Baldwin, chief human resources officer for PGCPS. At an Aug. 29 school board meeting, Baldwin explained that 118 drivers resigned in the past school year, including 31 who retired. She said more than 40 people were currently in the process of getting their commercial driver’s license (CDL) with the district’s help, and that PGCPS has started paying related expenses. Another 30 candidates are in training.
Baldwin said that her department held 40 driver recruitment events last year, including 27 in person. She is shifting the season for the driver recruitment push earlier, given the time needed for candidates to acquire a CDL.
Driver shortages in PGCPS aren’t a new problem, though they deepened during the pandemic. PGCPS was short 150 drivers in December 2019, according to a press release at that time. A 2016 report found a persistent PGCPS driver shortage. Back in 2000, The Washington Post reported that PGCPS was short 100 drivers, the largest gap among area school districts.
Drivers have blamed the shortage on inadequate pay for new drivers. Minimum starting pay for new bus drivers is $21.98 per hour. Starting pay in Prince George’s County is lower than in neighboring Montgomery County, and much lower than starting Metrobus driver rates.
New transportation improvements
At the Aug. 29 meeting, PGCPS officials asked for patience. “We’re looking to make progress, but not promise perfection,” said Charoscar Coleman, PGCPS chief operating officer. Coleman said PGCPS was in the first week of a three-year project to improve transportation.
At the same meeting, Keba Baldwin, PGCPS transportation director, presented on a recent reorganization of school start times that should help kids get to school on time. Now, the number of schools starting early (7:30 a.m.) and starting late (9:30 a.m.) is more even, according to Baldwin, which should allow more drivers to successfully complete staggered routes. School end times are less well aligned, though those too have improved, according to Baldwin.
Baldwin also pointed to success in consolidating bus routes. The number of stops in the system has gone down from 13,900 to 10,800 compared to last fall, he said, and the buses are now 62% full instead of 53% full.
Baldwin said that the average one-way bus ride for students has gone up by only one minute, to 63 minutes.
PGCPS has been able to achieve these successes in part because, using a new process, the families of 7,000 students have formally opted out of PGCPS transportation, according to Baldwin.
However, nearly 81,000 of 124,700 enrolled students still rely on PGCPS transportation, according to an August report by the district.
Over the next three years, PGCPS transportation will focus on improving four key outcomes, according to an Aug. 26 presentation to a school board committee: decreasing routes with no drivers; getting more buses to school on time; getting more families to use the StopFinder app, which helps parents track students’ buses; and reducing the number of buses that go back to the same school to pick up second loads of children.
Keba Baldwin said the district would report on these metrics every quarter, with the help of the transportation consultants who audited the school district last year.
What are families saying about PGCPS transportation?
In response to informal polling, several Hyattsville and College Park parents reported improvements in school busing, in comparison to the years immediately prior. Parents of children along different bus routes said buses that had been late the whole prior school year were arriving on time in the first week.
One relieved Hyattsville parent said she gave flowers, on Friday, Aug. 30, to a driver who had picked up her child on time before 7 a.m. every morning the first week.
However, the early mornings are difficult for students who are not getting to school on time. At the Aug. 29 school board meeting, 7-year-old Isaiah Smith stood at the podium, hands over his mouth, as his mother played a message he had recorded: “The problem is the bus is getting me to school late, and there’s no time to eat breakfast. … I end up being hungry all day.”
What’s more, not all students who need buses have them. A West Hyattsville parent cited safety concerns that prevent her child and others from walking to Northwestern. Her family lives just under two miles from school, too close for a high schooler to be entitled to a bus. Other Northwestern students, nearly two weeks into the school year, had a bus in the morning but no assigned afternoon bus.
At least one morning bus, to Thomas G. Pullen K-8 Creative and Performing Arts School, is scheduled to arrive well after the start of school.
Overall, the morning seems to be going more smoothly than the evening. Both at the school board meeting and in notes to the Life & Times, parents reported children getting home two hours after the end of school because of long bus rides home, sometimes following long waits at schools for buses to arrive.
Do we know where our kids are?
PGCPS is prioritizing continued rollout of the StopFinder app. The district has used a bus route app of some kind since at least 2019.
Parents noted that the PGCPS StopFinder app seemed to be finally working, even in the first weeks of school. The app, introduced in August 2021, shows parents where their child’s bus is on its route. Parents can set up alerts that tell them when the bus arrives at school or at their bus stop.
However, some parents also reported watching in the app as their bus went back to the school or the transportation lot, skipping their child’s stop.
Chief Operating Officer Coleman said the school district needs StopFinder in part because of the call volume, sometimes 6,000 calls a day in the first few weeks. Even with extra seasonal staff and an average call time of five minutes, PGCPS can only process 2,000 calls in the morning and 2,000 calls in the afternoon. Call wait times are an hour this time of year.
School board members passed along parents’ complaints that buses were not properly synced to the StopFinder app. Staff said PGCPS is reviewing that problem twice a day with an aim to make rapid progress.
“It takes time for improvement to take root and become routine,” Coleman said, citing the large number of staff participating in the StopFinder rollout.
More than one seasoned PGCPS parent is feeling relief and optimism. Hyattsville parent David Sheppard, whose son’s morning bus has been on time for the first time in years, wrote, “We can already see the improvement from past years. … I am glad they made the serious effort to improve transportation for our students.” He said he is hopeful that transportation improvements will continue.
And the Hyattsville kindergartner’s bus that didn’t come the first day? It’s been on time, more or less, every day since.
