A City Council member is introducing legislation on Thursday that would create a public school bus performance dashboard to push transportation companies to answer for poor service.
The bill’s sponsor, Councilman Lincoln Restler (D-Brooklyn), said the idea for the dashboard came in response to complaints of school bus delays and no-shows, with little means of holding vendors accountable for disruptions to children’s education.
“We hear from parents all the time who are struggling with persistently, chronically late school buses,” Restler said. “It feels like there’s nothing to be done about it. We collectively scream into a black hole of bureaucracy, and things don’t get better.”
“I am really eager for us to bring about a new generation of school bus operators that safely and consistently get our kids to school on time,” he added.
The bill comes as the city narrowly avoided a school bus shutdown last fall and is looking for legislative changes in Albany that would allow officials to re-bid contracts for better service.
“With this data, we can make a clear and compelling argument of which vendors have no business driving around our children,” Restler said.
The dashboard, as Restler envisions it, would allow parents and the broader public to look up their school bus route or bus company to better understand how their vendor is performing. The data would also be searchable by borough, district and school, and presented with data visualizations, summaries and supporting information.
Restler’s tool would also let users search by type of bus route, including if they’re transporting students in special education — who make up a large share of children who ride the bus.
The bill’s introduction comes as Kevin Moran, deputy chancellor of the Division of School Operations, has been teasing the school system’s own bus vendor “scorecard” at town halls across the city.
“What we’re doing now, for the first time ever, is producing a vendor scorecard,” Moran — who, before overseeing school operations, served as the chancellor’s senior adviser for student transportation — said last month in Upper Manhattan. “We’ve never had that before in our history.”
The scorecard will consist of things like on-time, arrival, breakdowns, latenesses and vintage of the bus, the deputy chancellor said. A representative for the city’s public schools did not provide more information about the tool or how it compares to the one proposed by Restler.
“Our students deserve reliable, safe and accountable transportation. Anything less is unacceptable,” said Nicole Brownstein, press secretary for the public schools. “We look forward to reviewing the legislation and we welcome the opportunity to collaborate on this important work with Council member Restler.”