The school buses that transport Arlington Public Schools students are under “a great strain” and reaching a “breaking point,” according to an independent report.
The problem, said Management Partnerships Inc., is that the school system has addressed problems with individual routes — adding a bus here, reducing the number of runs there — rather than focusing on a systemwide solution. As a result, many buses are critically underused, and others are tardy on typical days, making the system vulnerable to weather and safety emergencies.
“It is the assessment of the MPS that, absent action, there will be a breakdown of service and that this would prove costly of time and resources to correct once it has occurred,” the report says.
More than 45 percent of APS students get to school by bus, an option for elementary students with more than a mile to walk to school and for older students living 1.5 miles or more from their classrooms.
“As you can imagine, it is a tremendous challenge to plan for the transportation needs of so many students, including those who attend a neighborhood school as well as students with a longer ride to a countywide school,” said Gregory Sutton, director of transportation services for APS, in a letter to parents at the school year’s start.
According to the report, the buses’ cost and performance is currently up to standard, but that status is “tenuous,” highly dependent on key staffers and other variable factors.
The firm recommends APS completely rethink and restructure bus routes, and even look into shaking up the schools’ starting times. Elementary, middle and high schools start at times too close together to maximize a bus’ number of runs (the average per day is 5.5) without compromising on-time arrivals.
“This, coupled with the complexity of traffic and slow travel speeds, greatly constrains the system’s [efficiency],” says the report.
On average, APS buses operate at only 45 percent capacity, compared with the typical standard of 60 to 80 percent.
About 94.5 percent of afternoon buses arrived on time, during a sample day last June. Although a good rate, this concerned the auditors, who said it was “illustrative of a system under strain from a timeliness perspective, with any unplanned event likely to cause a systemwide problem.”
But the firm’s primary concern was the way the department was organized, calling for a more specialized, hierarchical structure. “Everything works, but only because of the personalities involved together with the experience and tenure of many individual staff members,” the report says. “In the experience of MPS, this is the environment that can lead to major service breakdowns.”
The firm told APS that it can accomplish its top priorities by the time the 2012-2013 school year starts, and that it will take a minimum of two years to overhaul the entire system.
