Where’s the Bus?

On March 7, a group of families and national advocacy organizations filed a class-action lawsuit against the District of Columbia school system on behalf of 4,000 special education students. The lawsuit alleged chronic failure to transport the students to school in a timely fashion, or at all. In Massachusetts, where I live, the state department of education responded to a similar group complaint against Boston Public Schools last year. “Students with disabilities are at times missing entire school days or parts of school days due to lack of appropriate transportation services to which they are legally entitled,” the department found.

Transportation often takes a backseat, as it were, in special education. But getting students to school entails the first order of business. Many of the buses and vans so dedicated are appointed with wheelchairs or restraint systems. About half carry trained monitors on board. Some students are picked up on the corner nearest their homes. Others, like my son Misha, require door-to-door transportation. Cambridge Public Schools transports Misha between our home and his placement at the Perkins School for the Blind, out of district. If the Individual Education Program of such students stipulates the need for such accommodations, they are guaranteed by federal and state law as a “related service.”

My son’s commute out of district demarcates the only time of the week when he is neither at home with me nor at school with his teachers. Because Misha does not speak, he gives no independent account of his comfort or safety. Because he depends on stable routines to maintain his equilibrium, a late pickup instigates a chain reaction that upsets his poise for learning.

Misha is one of 120 students whom Cambridge transports out of district. To parents of students without disabilities, Cambridge offers a “bus tracker system” for “communication, bus safety, and efficiency. Parents can download an app and follow the location of the bus in real time. To parents of special education students, Cambridge offers no such service.

The double-standard is common. In January, the EPA’s Clean School Bus Program announced the names of 280 school districts due to receive a cumulative total of $1 billion for the purchase of electronic buses. Transportation operators are experimenting with artificial intelligence to optimize fleet routing and manage traffic congestion. Meanwhile, 83 percent of special needs buses and vans nationwide lack electronic tracking technology, according to an annual survey reported in the February issue of School Bus Fleet. Special education students may be the only people in America who regularly ride buses and vans missing technology so basic that every public transportation system uses it.

Last month, following years of fruitless advocacy in Cambridge, I filed a disability discrimination complaint with the Office of Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Education.

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The double-standard effectively excludes special education students from being counted in the “chronic absenteeism” reckoning currently underway. “The lack of a tracking system prevents the district from promptly identifying and remedying noncompliance,” Massachusetts’s education department concluded in its investigation of Boston Public Schools last year. The class-action lawsuit in Washington D.C. argues the same point. Because that district “does not track whether students arrive to school on time or arrive home on time at the end of day in a systematic way,” school officials cannot inform a caregiver or parent “where their child is.”

The double-standard also mars state reporting procedures. My daughter attends the ninth grade in Cambridge’s public high school. Her progress reports disclose the number of times, if any, that she has been late or tardy. Contrariwise, the progress reports that I receive about Misha in his out-of-district placement at Perkins disclose no such information.

That is because Massachusetts collects public school attendance data but does not require out-of-district schools to report late arrivals or absences. Of the four offices that oversee Massachusetts special education—the Office of Approved Special Education Education Schools (OASIS), the Office of Special Education Planning and Policy (SEP), the Office of Public-School Monitoring (PSM), the Special Education in Institutional Settings (SEIS)—none proclaims standards for transportation or assesses compliance with state regulations.

The Student Opportunity Act, passed by the Massachusetts state legislature in 2019, included transportation as a reimbursable expense. Districts may draw up invoices for a portion of the cost of transporting students and then submit expenses to DESE’s Circuit Breaker Program.

I asked Associate Commissioner Jim Sullivan, the program’s manager, if those invoices, taken together, could throw some light on the performance of transportation vendors statewide. No, Mr. Sullivan answered. Districts are not required to report performance data. The only basis for an audit would inquire as to whether districts actually incurred the expenses.

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The lack of state supervision hives off responsibility to individual districts, which often outsource transportation to third-party vendors, reducing performance accountability to a matter of contract management. My inquiry about the absence of a real-time bus tracker on special education vehicles in Cambridge “has come up a gazillion times,” a School Committee member said in response to my testimony at a meeting in March.

Then why hasn’t the committee done anything about it?

Cambridge, like many districts in Greater Boston, outsources special education transportation to NRT Bus, one of many vendors currently consolidating as monopolies under the umbrella of private equity. NRT is owned by Beacon Mobility, which is owned by Audax Group. I will go out on a limb and say that Audax is probably not interested to max-out safety and performance accountability if doing so narrows their profit margin.

Policymakers need to step up and get real-time bus trackers on special education vehicles. There really is an app for that.