After weeks of confusion from school bus delays and poor communication from the school district, parents used the Oct. 1 meeting of the Cambridge School Committee as a chance to vent.
“My son now spends as much as an hour on the bus,” Jill Linnell said to committee members during a public comment period. “It should not be my job to tell you that this is not fixed.”
Linnell is just one of many parents described by interim Superintendent David Murphy as “understandably flummoxed and frustrated” in the wake of ongoing bus delays and complications over bus tracking devices meant to inform parents of arrival times.
The bus issues of the 2024-2025 academic year have a history, parents said. Though the problems were worst at the beginning of the school year, parent expressed frustration that delays persisted past the first month of school.
Murphy said morning bus routes were improving – “approximately 13 distinct routes saw modifications in the first three weeks,” he said, and “as those occurred, several routes saw significant improvement with respect to timeliness” – but parents said the district still hadn’t delivered on the better notice it had promised.
Parents got the first acknowledgment of delays Sept. 20 from Murphy and Mayor E. Denise Simmons, leader of the committee. “I believe this is because so many families were complaining,” said Jodi Ekelchik, the parent of an eighth grader at Putnam Avenue Upper School who recalled transportation issues for most years her child has been in the system.
Ekelchik is among many parents complaining of a lapse in communication between the school and transportation companies.
“I want everyone on this committee to understand that the subpar communication from the transportation office has been an issue since at least 2016 when my daughter started,” said Amber Bifolck-Fisher, a CPS parent.
Several parents took to the microphone and pleaded with the committee, sharing stories of anxiety-riddled children. “My son woke me up at 2:15 a.m and told me to make my coffee because he was worried we were going to be late to the bus,” said Linnell, whose son has already accrued 20 tardies since the start of the school year that she blames on bus issues.
Linnell complained also of her experiences with the district’s approach to parent notification. “Last year, I was shocked to see 27 tardy arrivals on my son’s report card. This was the only official communication I ever got from CPS to know that my son was arriving late to class,” she said.
This year, she said, she’s paying close attention.
Parents said they felt the burden was on them to communicate issues with bus delays and tracker inconsistencies. Harding agreed that as much as the district needed to fix the current technological and logistical problems, communicating to parents that the district is aware of the issues was the necessary first step.
By the end of the night the committee settled on a resolution that promised “a regular update to all families on routes where students arrived at their school after the official start of the school day,” which some parents still said failed to address the issue head on.
The order by School Committee members Elizabeth Hudson and Richard Harding called for parent complaints to be responded to within five business days in addition to the regular updates.
The faulty bus trackers will be readdressed once bus schedules are running on time, which Murphy called the top priority.
This post was updated Oct. 9, 2024, to correct the use of the name Amber Bifolck-Fisher.
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Why are the buses slow this year? Has anyone looked into it and provided an explanation? There hasn’t been any major population shift or school reorganization, so they should have started with the bus routes from last year and made minor modifications.