With the start of a new school year just days away, hundreds of students in Charlottesville City and Albemarle County Public Schools will be without bus seats on August 23, the first day of school.
For CCS students, the transportation situation largely mirrors last year’s, with the same walk zones and creative solutions like walking school buses. Though some families may be waitlisted at the start of the year, Community Relations Liaison Amanda Korman says more students will be assigned seats on buses soon. “The city is taking a conservative approach to assigning bus seats for the beginning of the school year to ensure that all high-need students are covered,” says Korman. “Within the first month of school, we expect to be able to significantly increase the number of students who have a seat on the bus.”
In early August, nearly 900 ACPS families received notice that their students would not have bus seats this year. “I am writing to inform you that we cannot assign [your student] to a bus route for the 2023-24 school year,” the letter said. “You must provide transportation for [your student] to and from school or seek alternative transportation arrangements, such as carpooling.”
While the district currently employs around 148 bus drivers, ACPS needs approximately 160 drivers to meet the high demand, according to Public Affairs and Strategic Communications Officer Phil Giaramita.
“As a result of the shortage, there are about 1,000 children for whom there’s no driver assigned to the route,” says Giaramita. “Since there’s not a driver assigned to the route, that bus won’t operate.” However, Giaramita is hopeful that the gap in service will be temporary for most, if not all, impacted families.
“We have historically had [bus service requests] for about 10,000 students, but actually only 6,000 show up on a regular basis,” he says. “After the first couple of weeks of school when things stabilize a little bit, we’ll have closer to what the actual number of riders [is] going to be. … That will allow us to redeploy drivers and that’ll help us restore service to even more kids who are now on the waitlist.”
Despite Giaramita’s optimism about restoring service, many families without bus service are currently struggling to sort out transportation for the fast-approaching start of school.
“Being at the school board meeting last week and giving public comments, one of the things that became very clear was that distance was not considered … for the families that were going to lose bus service,” says ACPS School Board candidate Allison Spillman. “The majority of people that lost bus service for their children are not in walking zones and don’t have a safe route to school. So their only option is to drive their kids to school.”
“We live 6.5 miles from Walton Middle School,” says ACPS mother Amy Foster. For working parents like Foster and her husband, dropping students off by 9am and picking them up at 4:05pm is difficult. Though the Fosters are currently coordinating a carpool to help out other nearby families, that solution has complications.
“I’m going to try to take as many kids as I can and also work with my work schedule … which means taking work calls in the car,” says Foster. “The signal down the road to Walton is not very [good], so we’re just going to have to do the best we can because there are no other options.”