A day after Mayor Michelle Wu backed away from her agreement with the state to have 95 percent of Boston school buses arrive on time, the state’s education agency remained silent on the issue, despite pleas from some city officials for it to enforce the agreement.
Wu and then-state Education Commissioner Jeffrey Riley came to an eleventh-hour agreement in June 2022 to prevent the state from designating the district “underperforming” and stepping up oversight of the district.
Part of that agreement required the district to hit an on-time arrival rate of 95 percent, a target Boston Public Schools has tried to meet for more than a decade. (In 2013, the district under then-mayor Thomas Menino set the 95 percent goal as part of its first busing contract with current bus operator Transdev.) But after Wu suggested Tuesday that the target was chosen arbitrarily, the education agency declined Wednesday to comment or give an interview with acting Commissioner Russell Johnston.
Since Riley stepped down in March, there appears to be little appetite to enforce the benchmark. Neither of the state Legislature’s education co-chairs responded to requests for comment Wednesday. The governor’s office referred the Globe to the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education for comment and pointed to a Sept. 11 comment from Johnston saying the district has not met its on-time performance goals, and the department continues to monitor the district’s efforts
The district has struggled with on-time arrivals to school since the new school year started Sept. 5, with two-thirds of the buses arriving to school late on the first day, the worst performance in at least nine years.
The 2022 agreement calls for the district to have 95 percent of buses arrive at school before the school bell and for 99 percent of buses arrive no more than 15 minutes late, both standards the district failed to meet last year and has yet to meet this year.
At the moment, neither goal appears immediately imminent. Instead, Wu’s short-term goal is to have 95 percent of buses arrive at school no more than 15 minutes late, she said Wednesday morning.
“The stated goal that we have is to get every student to school on time,” she said at a news conference. “What we saw in last year’s data was that the on-time performance within 15 minutes of bell time was pretty consistently above 95 percent, and we want to maintain that performance at least.”
Last year, 98 percent of the district’s buses arrived within that window, she said in a newsletter Monday evening. But BPS tracks on-time performance in two different ways. That number reflects only buses that have GPS tracking data. A separate set of data includes buses without GPS data, classifying all of them as late and bringing down the on-time performance rate. BPS agreed to report the latter set of numbers to the state after a high percentage of routes at the start of the 2022-23 school year were missing GPS data.
By the stricter metric, 95.6 percent of buses arrived within 15 minutes last year, according to a memo BPS sent to the state, while 87.7 percent arrived on time.
Wu’s comments Wednesday came after she, Superintendent Mary Skipper, and other city and district officials rode a school bus to Roxbury’s Higginson-Lewis K-8 school. The bus arrived at the school at 9:36, six minutes late. However, the bus wasn’t as late as it previously had been, pulling up to the school an average of 15 to 20 minutes late.
Wu has attributed the bus issues to two causes: the learning curve of a new GPS tracking app, Zūm, and a surge in late registrations.
Late registrations cause delays because, under the union busing contract, the district locks in its routes for bus drivers to bid on them on Aug. 9, before drivers do their test runs. But the addition of nearly 3,000 new student transportation requests since that time required nearly two-thirds of the bus routes to be changed. That’s double the changes the district had to make last year, Wu said.
The transportation issues have triggered widespread criticism among parents, education advocates, city officials, and most recently, the Massachusetts Republican Party.
“There is no excuse for bus delays, especially after an entire summer to prepare for this fundamental responsibility of the school system,” MassGOP Chair Amy Carnevale said in a statement Wednesday. “Working parents must be able to count on the schools to bring their children home on time, as even an hour’s delay can disrupt work schedules, with potentially severe consequences for their families.”
Last Thursday, Boston City Councilors Edward Flynn and Erin Murphy asked the state to investigate the district’s transportation system. They followed up with a letter to Skipper Wednesday reiterating the standards in the plan and calling for the district to hold itself accountable. Murphy said in an interview Wednesday that the chair of the state board of education, Katherine Craven, invited her and Flynn to speak during public comment at the board’s meeting Tuesday. However, the board didn’t place the issue on its agenda.
The board has been mostly hands-off on the state’s improvement plan, which did not require its approval. Then-commissioner Riley appeared to be the driving force behind the agreement, commissioning two state reviews on the district. He, too, declined to comment Wednesday.
And the state’s biggest leverage with the district — to take it over — may no longer be available. Only districts in the state’s bottom 10 percent can be put into receivership. And while the state doesn’t publish percentile rankings for districts, Skipper noted last month that the district no longer is in the bottom 10 percent of performance on the state’s MCAS exam. The state classifies Boston’s schools as “not requiring assistance or intervention.”
Staff writer James Vaznis contributed to this report.
Christopher Huffaker can be reached at christopher.huffaker@globe.com. Follow him @huffakingit.