Taken For A Ride On School Buses

In the month since the beginning of school, Newtown parents have watched in disbelief as their school administrators and Board of Education have failed their motor skills test. The results of their efforts to move from last year’s “four-tier” bus schedule to this year’s “three-tier” bus schedule have generated the same frustrations that come from trying to put a square peg in a triangular hole. It is just not working.

Scores of parents have shown up at the Board of Education’s meetings this past month to demand some answers to questions like: Why do our kids have to ride the bus for nearly an hour to get to a school that is just minutes away? Why are the high school and middle school buses so overcrowded? Why do the pickup and drop-off times keep changing? And by now, the school board must be asking itself: When will this nightmare end?

Unfortunately, the ill-fated three-tier transportation system has been poorly explained from the start, so the answers parents have been getting to their questions have only confused them more.

Parents wondering why the buses for the middle and high school runs were so overcrowded and so slow were told last week that school enrollment had grown more than had been anticipated. The district had projected an enrollment growth of 171 students, and 216 new students showed up for the first day of classes. That accounts for 45 unanticipated new students –– 30 of them riding the middle and high school buses. According the Superintendent of Schools Evan Pitkoff, there are 39 buses serving middle school and high school students, so the unforeseen enrollment amounts to less than one student per bus –– hardly enough to account for the kind of overcrowding that prompted the school board to add a 65-passenger bus, a 16-passenger “half bus,” and an eight-passenger van to the district’s bus fleet this month at a cost of $65,000.

The truth of the matter is that the three-tier system was poorly designed at the outset. One of the objectives of the new system was to fill the empty seats on buses serving the high school, where riding the bus to school is viewed by many students as a kind of humiliation. Putting high school students and middle school students on the same buses was settled on as the best way to meet this objective. Dr Pitkoff reported this week that last year there were 34 buses serving 767 students at the high school. This year there are 39 buses serving 1,667 students at both the high school and the middle school. That is five more buses to serve 900 more students. Obviously, the overcrowding is not because of unexpected enrollment –– it is because of a gross miscalculation in the original three-tier plan.

The three-tier system was initially promoted as a way to provide the same level of service as the previous four-tier system for less money. The savings, we were told during the budget battles last June, would be $124,000. However, after the level of service went from good last June to chaotic this September, those suggesting a return to a four-tier system were told last week that such a move would cost the school district an additional $400,000 over and above the $65,000 that has already been allocated in efforts to fix the system. There is an unexplained $341,000 discrepancy in these figures. We have no idea whether the cost savings that were cited last June were wrong or the extra costs that were cited last week were wrong. Either way, something just does not add up.

The school board has hired a consultant at an as-yet undisclosed hourly rate to get all the pegs in the right holes. (Ironically, the consultant is from a bus company passed over by the board for a bus contract earlier this year, even though it was the low bidder.) The explanation now is that everything will be resolved by the middle of October. Frankly, we have stopped listening to explanations coming from school officials on this issue; they have only confused the issue in the past. When it comes to explaining this school bus fiasco, frankly they have lost their credibility.