Houston school bus woes linger
Exodus of drivers after Harvey forces districts to cut back on service.
Each weekday, Sophie Enamorado shows up at Beck Junior High School around 6:30 a.m., about an hour before the first bell rings.
She’s not there for an early morning club meeting or tutoring. It’s the only time her mother, Sarah, can drop her off before heading to work 30 miles away in Houston. Sarah Enamorado said she no longer lets her daughter ride Katy school district buses because after Hurricane Harvey, the district reduced the number bus stops in her neighborhood — leaving her daughter with a longer walk on busy roads in the morning darkness.
“These kids have been through hell this year. Can they just have their normal lives and bus routes back?” Sarah Enamorado said.
School transportation across greater Houston has been thrown out of whack since Hurricane Harvey drenched the region five months ago. Flooding displaced thousands of students, made bus routes harder to navigate and led to an exodus of bus drivers from districts already struggling to retain them. In the storm’s aftermath, districts have been hard-pressed to maintain services with little to no additional funding from the state and federal governments. Among the challenges: Dozens of bus drivers left their jobs after the storm, either to live elsewhere or to seek higher-paying jobs.
To comply with federal law, districts must transport thousands of displaced students, sometimes from other school districts, back to their schools of origin.
School officials are paying charter bus companies to ferry students from campuses damaged by flooding to dry ones. In the Clear Creek district, officials have begun providing gift cards for gas to parents as an incentive to drive their children to school. Other districts have hired contractors to transport students from outside their boundary lines.
The Texas Education Agency told districts in October that it would cover the cost of transporting displaced students, including those residing outside their home district, through the Foundation School Program. It said it
would also help districts offset the costs of driving students from flooded schools to dry ones. But that money has not made its way to many districts, officials said.
The Katy district has been spending about $200,000 more per month on transportation since Harvey.
The Houston district paid about $80,000 a month for charter buses to drive students from seven flooded campuses to temporary classrooms during the fall semester.
Spring is spending an extra $15,000 a month so a thirdparty vendor can transport 80 displaced students.
“There is certainly no additional funding that has been made available as far as transportation is concerned,” said Keith Kaup, director of transportation for Spring.
Parents frustrated
Transportation challenges since Harvey have frustrated parents and students, some of whom have abandoned school buses for Metro buses or carpools.
Enamorado said she gave up on Katy district buses after they did not provide her 11-year-old daughter with transportation to Beck Junior High while they were forced to live in a FEMA-funded hotel room.
She said the district again failed to provide her daughter with transportation when they lived in a short-term rental apartment near Interstate 10, even after Enamorado filled out district paperwork declaring the family homeless.
Now that they’re back in their home, Enamorado said, there are still issues. Katy has reduced the number of bus stops in her Canyon Gate neighborhood from about five to two.
Although Enamorado now allows Sophie to take the bus home and walk, she will not let her do so in the mornings.
“From my home to the bus stop is six-tenths of a mile. It used to be a block,” Enamorado said. “In my neighborhood there are tons of construction crews coming through in the mornings. I’m not going to let my daughter walk that far in the dark while all these strangers are coming through our neighborhood.”
Lee Crews, chief operations officer for the Katy district, said it was difficult to get into neighborhoods like Canyon Gate because of the scale of Harvey’s devastation. Debris piles spilled onto roads, and some neighborhoods were devoid of students as families sought shelter with friends and relatives or in hotels paid for by FEMA.
He said routes within the Canyon Gate neighborhood have been reinstated as much as possible since it was flooded.
Inadequate funding
Operations managers at Texas’ school districts have been groaning about transportation funding for years.
The transportation funding system has not been changed by state lawmakers since 1984, nor has the rate at which the state reimburses districts. Some routes in less dense areas of the state get 68 cents per mile, according to the TEA’s School Transportation Allotment Handbook, while those deemed the most efficient receive $1.43.
Meanwhile, the number of people pursing bus driving careers has been declining, officials say.
Rather than operating big rigs and school buses, people are signing up to drive smaller vehicles with services such as Uber and Amazon. Districts have tried to boost pay to combat the problem. In 2017, for example, Spring trustees approved raising hourly pay from $15.41 to $16.50.
Districts have even begun placing ads on the sides of buses, promising training and decent wages for those willing to become drivers.
It’s also more difficult to obtain a commercial driver’s license.
In 2016, the Texas Department of Public Safety cut the number of sites where drivers can take their commercial license test. The department said closing offices was the most cost-effective way to institute new federal directives requiring that it add equipment and services to existing sites.
To offset that loss, the DPS allowed school districts and some other groups to offer the tests starting last April. Spring earned that distinction in October.
Kaup said Spring went on a driver hiring spree last spring and summer. A $330 million bond referendum approved by voters in 2016 provided $10.5 million to replace buses and transport students who live more than a mile from their school.
The state provides funding for students who live 2 miles away and beyond, and Spring had already been transporting students who lived as close as 1.5 miles from their campus.
“Because we already planned to ramp up the capacity for drivers, when Harvey hit, we were in great position to respond to those needs,” Kaup said.
Other districts were not as well staffed, and shortages grew much worse after Harvey.
Driver shortage
When Houston district Chief Operating Officer Brian Busby asked his transportation department how many drivers would be able to transport students after the storm hit in late August, he was stunned by the reply. About 120 of roughly 900 drivers said they were unable to return.
The district has cut the number of vacant positions to 25.
Katy, about a third of the size of the Houston district, was down about 30 drivers after the storm. To fill the gap, Katy officials asked sports coaches with commercial driver’s licenses to take on bus routes.
Some districts lost buses to Harvey’s floodwaters, either because of where they were parked or because districts were using them to assist with high-water rescues.
And while the number of buses and drivers across the Houston area fell, the number of displaced students needing transportation surged.
The federal McKinney-Vento Act requires school districts to transport students deemed homeless (such as many of those displaced by Harvey) from wherever they are currently residing to their campus of origin. After Harvey, about 450 “homeless” Spring students were being transported under those requirements.
Though districts can be reimbursed for transporting such students under the federal law, few, if any, have received money since the storm.
Bill Wood, Katy’s executive director of transportation, said officials are drawing on their general operating fund to pay the extra costs.
“We’re hopeful for reimbursement for a lot of these McKinney-Vento students, but it’s a process,” he said.