Maria Fazio spends most mornings at work watching a purple dot move slowly through a map of Brooklyn on what she and other parents of Sterling School students call “the cursed route.”
That dot is a tracking device inside her 9-year-old son Antonio’s backpack. It monitors his trip aboard a yellow, city-funded school bus that travels from Fazio’s home in Bergen Beach, to Sheepshead Bay, Flatbush and Brownsville, before reaching his school in Brooklyn Heights, which serves children with dyslexia. Door-to-door, the trip is only 7 miles. But it can take three hours each way.
Fazio said Antonio frequently misses first period, which is dedicated to one-on-one literacy instruction.
“That’s the reason why we send him there, and [he’s] missing that hour,” she said.
Complaint records filed with the Department of Education show Fazio and other parents flagged at least 24 separate delays about this route to the city’s Office of Pupil Transportation last year. But according to the department’s public data on school bus performance, those delays never happened.
The discrepancy highlights what lawmakers and advocates say is a key flaw in how the city manages its long-dysfunctional school bus system. While school bus companies can be penalized for persistently getting kids to school late, the education department relies on those companies to self-report delays and other issues. The result, a Gothamist analysis found, is that city officials do not have accurate figures on the extent of school bus delays that cut into students’ instructional time and create a constant source of stress for them and their families.
Gothamist spoke with Fazio and seven other parents in different parts of the city who together logged 111 school bus delays and no-shows in the past two school years. Of that total, only 26 appear in the city’s data.
Parents said chronic school bus delays are a major source of stress.
Heidi Norton
The delays disproportionately affect students with disabilities who depend on transportation to specialized programs. Those students already face tremendous academic obstacles, and they are far less likely to graduate from high school than their peers.
Children with disabilities make up almost half the pupils who ride the city’s school buses. Parents told Gothamist their kids missed entire lessons and crucial special education services. The parents said they also struggled to get to work on time because they often have to take their children to school when the bus doesn’t arrive.
Gothamist relied only on documented complaints for its analysis, including emails and screenshots of messages to the city’s Office of Pupil Transportation. All the parents said their kids’ school buses had additional delays that weren’t reported.
Ben Kallos, a former city councilmember who co-wrote legislation passed in 2019 that requires the education department to collect and publicly share data on school bus delays, said he never intended for it to be supplied by bus companies.
Kallos expected the data to come from GPS systems on the buses – systems that the city purchased for tens of millions of dollars to mixed reviews. However, the legislation did not explicitly require the use of GPS data.
“I can hail an Uber, a Lyft … I can have a delivery from a restaurant show me exactly where the cyclist is at any given second, and somehow the city can’t do that for a school bus,” Kallos said. “It’s unacceptable.”
Rita Joseph, chair of the City Council’s education committee, said the shoddy data provided by the bus companies prevents legislators from understanding the problem and addressing it. She said she is considering legislation to strengthen the law that requires the education department to report delays, and that she will advocate for changes to the city’s contracts with bus companies.
“I need GPS, I need better service. I need better customer service,” Joseph said. “I need real enforcement standards.”
Fazio, the mother in Bergen Beach, said the chronic delays mean she is often late to work as a second-grade teacher because she has to stay with her son until the bus shows up. “My anxiety is through the roof,” she said, noting other staff members have to cover for her when she’s tardy.
Maria Fazio, a teacher, says she watches her son’s school bus trip on the “cursed route” with a sense of dread.
Courtesy of Maria Fazio
Her son Antonio takes medication for ADHD. Fazio always gives Antonio his meds just as he’s getting ready to leave the house. The ride to school is often so late and long, she said, that those meds are already starting to wear off by the time he gets to class.
“He’s way behind,” she said. “We have to do better than this. These children have special needs, and they’re being crapped on.”
Education department spokesperson Dominique Ellison said the agency is dedicated to ensuring that all students arrive at school on time. “We take all delays seriously and are actively working with our vendors to minimize disruptions and get all students to their destinations on time,” she said.
The agency maintains that overall delays are only a small percentage of the total trips to and from school: less than 3% of 3.4 million annual trips.
Each day, the city updates school bus delays on its Open Data platform. In response to questions about the discrepancies, Ellison directed Gothamist to a separate, audited version of the data that the agency submits to the City Council twice a year, saying it’s “more current and accurate.” But a Gothamist analysis found it did not contain any better documentation of the delays reported by the parents.
Nonetheless, the largest union representing the city’s bus drivers and a coalition of bus companies insisted that drivers and bus operators accurately report delays.
“Our school bus workers are professionals,” said Carolyn Rinaldi of the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1181. “We not only believe that they are reporting delays accurately and in a timely manner, we know they are doing so.”
Carolyn Daly, a spokesperson for a coalition of the city’s largest bus companies, said some traffic delays are “unavoidable” in a congested city, and that companies face higher penalties for failing to report them. A national school bus driver shortage is compounding the situation, she said.
“Companies are pulling out all the stops to recruit drivers, including signing bonuses, flexible hours and higher pay,” she said.
Flawed data obscures a grave problem
East Bronx parent Andrea Daniels shared six emails showing she filed complaints about her daughter’s delayed school bus during the 2023-24 school year. She said the bus was late countless other days but that she didn’t have the time to report every instance. The city’s data, however, shows no delays for her route in the past two years.
Daniels’ daughter Jada, who is on the autism spectrum, just graduated from Bronx High School for the Visual Arts. She said her daughter frequently missed her first-period English Language Arts class last year — cumulatively amounting to several weeks’ worth of instruction — even though they live fewer than 2 miles from school. Daniels found out that her daughter was failing the class during a parent-teacher conference last November.
Jada Daniels frequently missed English class due to her school bus being late, her mother said.
Andrea Daniels
“She was losing motivation because she wasn’t getting to class on time,” she said. “And she was missing assignments and handing them in late.”
Another Bronx parent, Jennifer Cruz, has reported 24 delays to the city’s education department over the past two years. But public data shows the route was delayed only three times during that period.
Her 10-year-old son Jonathan has autism and attends a special school near Stuy Town, just under 10 miles from their home. She said he’s an especially funny kid who loves Legos and wants to be a scientist. He also has anxiety, craves routine and dreads sudden changes in plans.
But she said his bus is plagued by lengthy delays, and rides regularly last more than two hours each way. The disruption to his routine causes his anxiety to spike. Long bus rides sometimes trigger his asthma. Cruz said there have been times when Jonathan was on the bus for so long he soiled himself.
“It’s like a piece of my heart is going out into the world, you know?” she said of sending her son to school. “I’m holding my breath until he gets there. Then he gets on the bus to come back, and I’m holding my breath again.”
Cruz was shocked to learn the city relies on bus companies to self-report delays.
“It’s not a helpful strategy at all,” she said. “They have to get the real data and take the parent complaints into consideration. It would force the bus companies to resolve issues.”
Accurate data on school buses has eluded the city for at least a decade.
From 2015 to 2019, the city used a GPS system for school buses called Navman that cost $9 million. But a Special Commissioner of Investigation probe found that nearly 80% of drivers didn’t log onto the tracking system either because it didn’t work or their contract didn’t require them to do so, rendering the technology “useless.”
The mother of Jonathan Cruz, 10, says he’s at times been stuck on his school bus for so long that he’s soiled himself.
Jennifer Cruz
In 2019 that system was replaced with $36 million GPS tech purchased from the ride-share company Via, but many drivers were slow to log on to this system as well.
By the end of the last school year, 90% of drivers were logging onto the system, according to the education department. Parents reported widespread problems with the app on the first two days of school.
A spokesperson for Via, Sara-Jessica Dilks, said the company “has been doing everything it intended to in terms of providing parents, NYCPS staff, and school users with trackable, real-time information about students’ bus locations.”
Last spring, the education department solicited new bids for additional GPS technology on school buses.
But the agency continues to rely on the school bus drivers and their companies to self-report delays.
The country’s largest school bus system
New York City has the country’s largest school bus system. It’s also uniquely complex. It serves about 150,000 children who ride 9,000 routes serving 3,000 schools. Of the total students, 66,000 students with disabilities attend a mix of public and private schools, but are entitled to publicly funded bus service. Their buses crisscross the five boroughs, with some going to the suburbs to bring children to schools best suited to meet their needs.
A school bus depot in Red Hook. New York City spends $1.9 billion on student transportation.
Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
Most big cities manage a single in-house bus fleet or work with one or two private companies. Atlanta and Boston have their own fleets. Los Angeles contracts with one private company. But New York City contracts with more than 40 vendors employing drivers from three unions. The city spends $1.9 billion annually on student transportation, up from $1 billion a decade ago.
Parents and advocates said the city’s school bus system is also uniquely dysfunctional. The city’s yellow bus industry has a sordid history featuring corrupt union leaders, unscrupulous city officials, negligent drivers and organized crime.
“You hear from students and families who have essentially been crying into a void for years, upon years, upon years about the inadequacies,” said Nyah Berg, a leader of The Road to Better Busing Coalition, a group made up of education and disability rights advocates.
Berg said many of the system’s problems are rooted in contracts with bus companies that were brokered in 1979 and haven’t been meaningfully updated in 46 years. She said the outdated contracts do not include the accountability necessary to ensure kids get to school and back on time.
“ It’s like being stuck in a Groundhog Day. A Groundhog Day of Hell,” Berg said.
A long-standing labor dispute over benefits and job protections for veteran drivers – even if their company goes out of business – has resulted in the outdated contracts remaining in effect.
Gothamist identified more than 100 school bus delays reported by parents that were not reflected in official city data.
Heidi Norton
Parents and advocates said those contracts do not include strong enough provisions covering basic service, such as requirements to use GPS devices on school buses to provide more accurate data on service.
Opportunity for reform
Many of the school bus contracts expired this summer, and the city has been extending them on a month-to-month basis. Officials have said they are considering a short-term extension until state legislators address the dispute over bus driver seniority protections.
State lawmakers have introduced legislation to enshrine the disputed labor provision so that negotiations over new contracts can progress.
Gregory Faulkner, head of the Panel for Educational Policy, which approves New York City public schools contracts, said he will only sign off on long-term contracts that include more accountability for bus companies and drivers.
“I think the data needs to be collected independently and it needs to go directly to the Office of Pupil Transportation and know what’s working or not working,” he said. “Relying on the bus companies to provide the evaluation of themselves is not going to be the most objective evaluation. It makes no sense… We can do better.”
Joseph said she also wants better data. She plans to hold a hearing on school buses and will now consider tightening the reporting law on service and delays.
“The reporting bill has to be better,” she said. “Maybe I need to go back and amend that and tweak it so I’m getting better responses because that data’s gonna drive my policy.”
Many parents, meanwhile, are bracing for another turbulent start to the school year.
“September is the absolute worst,” Fazio said. “I’m literally dreading the next few weeks.”
Fazio said on the first day of class Antonio’s bus was so late her husband drove him to school. She’d already asked her husband, a firefighter, to take the day off in anticipation of problems with the school bus.