CHCCS Addresses Bussing Issues

Unfortunately for many around the Chapel Hill – Carrboro City School district, stories like the one this resident told the Board of Education Thursday night have been common this school year.

“My granddaughter attends Smith (Middle School),” he said. “She had a field trip yesterday. She didn’t get to school in time for it, but they did hold (the bus).”

Due to a number of circumstances, the district has had a problem getting students to school on time to start the year.

Over the summer CHCCS hired a consultant to help update its bus route software, which was 10 years out-of-date. The consultants ran the program to generate new bus routes.

“As soon as we saw the routes we knew there were issues,” said interim superintendent Jim Causby. “But school was up on us so we had to go with what we had.”

Causby said some of the routes were too long wouldn’t get to their intended destination on time.

Parents have complained that buses are coming late to pick up students and in some cases missing students entirely.

Assistant superintendent Todd LoFrese said there have been a number of communication problems with in the software the district uses.

“Today I saw a situation where a kid didn’t have a bus stop merely because the street name was ‘whatever it was’ Ln.,” LoFrese said. “Instead of having a period at the end, it had a comma. The transportation software couldn’t read the comma so a stop was never created.”

Elementary school buses have been arriving on time, but middle school buses have been arriving late, causing the high school buses to come even later.

LoFrese said once the problem with the middle school buses has been fixed, the high school buses should arrive on time as well.

“That’s our priority, get kids to school on time,” he said. “After that we’re going to go back into all the routes and we’re going to look for whatever we can do for efficiency.”

The district has already implemented route changes for Friday and next Tuesday when kids return from a long weekend.

“We’ve apologized to everyone we can,” Causby said. “None of this was intended, but it was a circumstance where a number of different issues just came together.”