School bus meltdown: New software erased old routes
District offifficials: Series of errors made in debut of routing program.
When Palm Beach County school bus drivers got their new route assignments this month, they realized quickly that they’d been given a recipe for failure.
The pickup schedules for many schools did not make sense. The time allotted to get from one stop to another was often physically impossible.
Some routes seemed dangerous. Drivers said many required buses to make perilous turns. Or children to cross six lanes of traffiffic to walk home. Or special-needs children to wait on a street corner rather than in their driveway.
Instead of the usual collaborative planning process, the new bus schedules seemed to have Check out education reporter Andrew Marra’s frequent updates on Palm Beach County schools at the Extra Credit blog: been spit out by a machine. That’s because they were. The problem- fifilled routes were the product of the school district’s botched launch of its new bus-routing software, a program that was supposed to make school buses more effifficient but created deeply flflawed routes instead, records and interviews with administrators and drivers show.
The result was the county’s largest school bus meltdown in recent memory, stranding thousands of public school students at bus stops and on campuses last week as buses routinely ran more than an
hour late.
While several factors contributed to the meltdown, district offifficials say the main culprit was a series of errors made this summer as the district’s transportation department debuted its new routing software. Among the missteps: ■ Offifficials let the new program rewrite nearly 2,000 routes from scratch, overriding years of tweaks and improvements made by drivers and supervisors familiar with the roads.
■ The time that buses would arrive at high schools was changed from 7 a.m. to 7:15 a.m. without the knowledge of top administrators. The unauthorized decision forced buses into heavier traffiffic and further delayed elementary and middle school pickup times.
■ Officials rushed to implement the new system a year earlier than planned, discarding plans to put it in place slowly so they could roll out a new GPS bus-tracking feature.
■ Though bus compound supervisors regularly tweak routes before classes start, none was trained this year on how to use the new program, resulting in huge delays in making needed changes.
As veteran bus drivers became aware of problems with the routes in the weeks before school, they complained to school district administrators.
But administrators dismissed the concerns and concealed the problems from Superintendent Robert Avossa and other top administrators, administrators and drivers now say.
Drivers: School offifficials ‘refused to listen’
“We were telling them it wasn’t working,” said veteran driver Joyce Lynch. “They refused to listen and refused to listen.”
The most common complaint: unrealistic and sometimes bizarre pickup and drop-offff times.
A Palm Beach Central High bus route requires its driver to barrel two miles down Jog Road from Lake Worth Road to Lantana Road in just three minutes — while making another stop on the way.
Even without the extra stop, Google Maps estimates it should take a car at least four minutes to make the drive.
An Eagles Landing Middle School route gives its driver just six minutes to drive 5 miles from Barfifield Road in Delray Beach to the corner of West Atlantic Avenue and Persimmon Avenue, west of Florida’s Turnpike.
Google’s estimated drive time: at least 10 minutes.
The problems didn’t stop with unrealistic travel times. A Watson B. Duncan Middle bus route requires its driver to be at two separate stops along Prosperity Farms Road at the same time.
Lynch said her middle school route schedules her to depart from the school at the exact moment she arrives — with no time for students to board.
“I’m supposed to be at my middle school at 45 and leave at 3:45 to take these kids home,” she said.
It’s not clear whether the scheduling problems were the result of software malfunctions or errors created by transportation offifficials trying to adjust the routes manually, said Mike Burke, the school district’s chief operating offifficer.
Dangerous conditions
But he said he knew of no defects in the routing program, which is called Compass and was purchased last year for $217,000.
“I would not criticize the system itself,” Burke said. “I blame more the management of the process.”
Bus drivers pointed to dangerous conditions created by the new routes, including one — a driver said — that requires students to cross six-laned Haverhill Road to get home from their stop.
“You’re endangering these people’s children’s lives,” bus driver Jane Brown said.
The school district has long used mapping software to help plan its more than 2,000 routes. Typically, most are only tweaked from year to year, Burke said.
Those time-tested routes were supposed to be preserved when transportation offifficials switched to the Compass system.
Instead, the old routes were erased, Burke said. In their place, Compass created new routes based on its own mapping program.
“It reinvented the routes,” Burke said. “There’s programming in the new system that led to a signifificant number of route changes.”
At the same time, transportation offifficials quietly pushed back the time that high school students arrive at school, from 7 a.m. to 7:15.
The change was done without consulting top administrators or the school board. It rippled through the rest of the county’s bus schedules, pushing them further into the morning’s heavy-traffific periods. The result was chaos. With Avossa and other top administrators apparently unaware of the problem, schools opened to widespread delays.
On Monday, roughly 40 percent of the count y’s 650 buses ran late. Most run three routes. By Friday, that fifigure had dropped to 26 percent but was still far above normal performance.
The drivers’ union aimed its criticisms at Steve Bonino, the district’s chief of support operations, whom drivers accused of ignoring their complaints about problems for weeks.
“The problem is he’s not willing to listen to the bus drivers,” said Afififa Khaliq, a spokeswoman for the drivers’ union.
‘No one ... said the Titanic is sinking’
Avossa had harsh words for transportation offifficials, too, calling them “tone deaf ” and accusing them of concealing problems from him until the fifirst day of school.
“No one came and said the Titanic is sinking,” he said.
Avossa said he also was never alerted that the department was short roughly 50 drivers, even though transportation offifficials had learned of it days earlier when dozens of drivers failed to show up for a practice run.
Bonino declined requests for comment last week and was absent as administrators briefed school board members and reporters on the problems.
Computerized routing systems such as Compass are valuable tools but aren’t intended to function without human feedback, said Scott Pfender, transportation supervisor for Lake County’s public schools and president of the Florida Association for Pupil Transportation.
“The person sitting at the computer doesn’t know what’s going on. They need to get that feedback from the drivers,” said Pfender, whose department also uses Compass. “Only the people on the route know that if you go this way, you’re going to get stuck in traffiffic.”
District offifficials said they would work through this weekend re-creating routes by hand. They say they hope the changes will lead to drastic improvements this week.
“This weekend we will have all hands on deck,” Avossa said.