Thank you to Chair Joseph and Chair Won for holding this important hearing today. Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso commends this Council’s leadership on the issue of accessing quality pupil transportation for our most vulnerable New Yorkers. While we recognize New York City Public School’s system, the largest in the nation, transports approximately 146,777 students citywide, there is no excuse for inadequate service. When we fail to provide reliable transportation for our students, we also fail to meet our federal mandate to ensure that all students have access to education regardless of circumstance, and we fail parents/guardians, employers, and others who expect and rely on a stable system.
This Council needs no reminder of how critical this issue is for families; however, Borough President Reynoso would like to highlight a few key related points:
Vulnerable Populations. Students across this city who face challenges such as living with a disability or living in unstable, temporary housing deserve more. When our schools fail to provide suitable, consistent transportation, we disrupt a student’s start to the school day and often lose valuable instructional time. We also must consider the social and emotional implications for students whose IEPs outline specific accommodations, including the need for a predictable routine.
Parents report to our office regularly that their children’s routes are changed daily. We are told that parents often learn of changes to their child’s route, or even service outages, minutes before scheduled pick-up. To add insult to injury, when parents go through the proper channels to report an issue to the Office of Pupil Transportation (OPT), they are met with unresponsiveness, whether that be poor customer service, longer-than-normal wait times, inaccessible links on the website and through their apps, etc. Many parents are forced to take their children to school themselves, and risk being late to work and missing valuable time. For some students with disabilities, at-home instruction becomes the only option, which violates a child’s right to equal access to education. Parents also report issues with the new app, Via, often stating the driver is off-network or unable to be tracked. DOE reporting on the number of downloads and successful logins does not capture the quality of the app itself and should be reviewed further.
Additionally, due to outdated contracts, many of our students who require transportation are also unable to take advantage of valuable extra-curricular opportunities in the same way their peers can. After-school opportunities, which have been shown to improve both academic and social-emotional learning outcomes, are off the table for students who take yellow buses. We must acknowledge that this population is the exact set of students who would benefit from this experience.
As the Council has highlighted regularly, Summer Rising is an important experience for many of our students, with academic learning in the morning and enrichment activities in the afternoon, including field trips, project-based learning, SEL activities, and more. Yet students with IEPs and students living in temporary housing are unable to attend the full day of program, often missing the most fun and engaging parts of day when their bus comes before 6:00 PM. Time cut short from working with their peers and time cut from new and enriching experiences is exact opposite of what we want for our young New Yorkers.
Contracts. New York City Public Schools has testified that most of their bus contracts with vendors are over 45 years old. This is unfathomable for a rapidly changing city. The inability to serve our most vulnerable students because a contract doesn’t have the proper provisions is unacceptable. There is no reason why in 2024 families must go through an arduous and fraught IEP process just to get mandated climate control on their buses. All fleets should have such simple accommodations regardless of IEP.
This is the symptom of a greater problem and challenge. I commend New York City Public Schools for its call for the State legislature to authorize offering new contracts with the inclusion of Employee Protection Provisions (EPPs). New York State must ensure that while we modernize services and hold our vendors accountable, we do so while ensuring stability in the industry and labor practices that incentivize employment. This market must expand tremendously to meet New York City’s demand, including offering more contracts to different vendors who have historically been shut out of the industry, like M/WBEs.
We need the ability to hold vendors accountable when they fail to provide quality service and reward vendors who do great work. We recently had the opportunity to visit NYCBUS and see firsthand the partnership with District 75 Brooklyn schools to build out pathways for students to work at their depot, supporting in a number of roles. While we hope to expand this initiative, it is symbolic of the innovation our new vendors have in supporting our New York City Public Schools.
Borough President Reynoso looks forward to the passage of State legislation and the subsequent update to bus contracts that build in greater accountability structures; place new benchmarks on vendors to reach complete fleet transition to green energy; include metrics tied to arrival and drop-off times; and include climate control and extended hours for summer, evenings, and Saturdays.
Legislation. Lastly, Borough President Reynoso supports Intro 0515, requiring the Department of Education to report on Employee School Bus Transportation services. We cannot move the needle if information is not publicly available to all stakeholders. With reports of shortages nationwide, it is imperative that Council and the public are able to dig deep into the data and identify new, innovative opportunities to expand services and address gaps.
Thank you again for the opportunity to testify today. We look forward to working with the Council to ensure reliable and accommodating transportation options for all our students.
City Council Committees on Education & Contracts Oversight: Upgrading School Transportation Services & Rebidding Contracts
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