Boston Public Schools beginning in May will automatically pause transportation services for students who do not consistently ride the bus, district and city leaders announced Wednesday.
The new policy aims to improve the reliability and efficiency of the district’s transportation system, which for years has been plagued late and no-show buses. The district will follow students’ ridership with its real-time bus tracking app, Zūm, which the district launched at the start of this school year. The app allows parents and caregivers to view their children’s school bus assignment and get real-time updates. The app will track both door-to-door and corner stops.
If a student, including those with special needs who receive door-to-door service, doesn’t ride the bus for two weeks, or 10 consecutive school days, without communicating with the district, their transportation will be paused, said Dan Rosengard, director of transportation for BPS. Families will be notified their student is being opted out of the bus service and given three days to communicate with the district if they want to reverse the decision.
Families can opt back into transportation at any time, said Rosengard, who introduced the policy along with Superintendent Mary Skipper at a roundtable discussion with Mayor Michelle Wu at The Rafael Hernández School.
If no students at a certain stop ride the bus consistently, the policy dictates BPS can pause that stop entirely, said Sujata Wycoff, deputy chief of communications at BPS.
“Even if only some of the students assigned to the stop don’t ride the bus, pausing transportation for those non-riding students creates opportunities to move stops to more efficient locations when we are creating routes for next school year,” Wycoff said.
Officials estimated about 1,000 students who have not been taking the bus consistently this school year will be opted out of transportation, shaving down time and improving school bus on-time arrival rates.
“We will ensure that we’re only running routes for students who consistently use the bus so that we’re using our resources efficiently and equitably,” Rosengard said. “That will get us closer to where we want to be.”
The district for years has struggled with its transportation operations, and Wednesday’s announcement of the policy change is the latest in its efforts to improve. Ahead of this school year, the district debuted the new app and announced its yellow buses were fully staffed with drivers and monitors. Transportation is one of the areas the district was charged to improve under a three-year state improvement plan that ends in June. Under the agreement, the district must have a 95 percent arrival rate, which is has nearly met now. Months into the current school year, however, students were left stranded by no-show buses or late buses, including athletes who missed games or were forced to use ride-share vehicles or taxis to get to their destinations.
Skipper said reducing that number of riders will also slash costs.
“Those thousand riders who are not using the bus, by being able to take them out of the system, that saves almost a million dollars that can actually be redirected into classrooms,” she said.
The new policy was developed and unanimously recommended by the city’s Transportation Advisory Council, Wycoff said.
Wednesday’s roundtable discussion, which several parents of BPS students and other city officials attended, was focused on garnering feedback on changes to the system after the 2024-25 school year started with two-third of buses arriving late to school on the first day. Officials said the tardiness was due to the implementation of the Zum app and that adjusting to the technology took longer than expected.
“Transportation failures are a huge equity issue when parents are not able to drive their kids as a backup plan when the bus doesn’t show up or the tracker isn’t reliable,” said Eugenia Rojas Puente, a mom of two BPS kids, at the roundtable.
BPS also released a report Wednesday that showed 94 percent of buses that arrived at school did so before the morning bell. That is the highest monthly on-time performance recorded in the past five years, according to the report.
The report showed afternoon drop-off times were lower this year than the past four school years; in March 2025, the district’s afternoon on-time performance averaged 86 percent, according to the report. This was still the highest monthly performance of the school year.
On Wednesday, parents said they have seen improvements in arrival and drop-off times and more accurate on-time tracking thanks to the Zūm app.
“I used to have no shows for days,” said Shamieh Wall, mom of a first grader in BPS. “I just don’t have that issue anymore.”
Still, some said the app can be unreliable.
Puente, the mom of two BPS kids, said she’d like to see more timely and accurate notifications about unexpected events, such as mechanical issues, traffic accidents, or bad weather. She and other parents also said students sometimes forget to check themselves in on the bus, leaving parents worried about whether their kids made it to the bus.
“The app is fine when it works, but is way too unreliable when it is not working, and that is unfortunately happening frequently,” she said.
Kelsey Brendel, the mom of a 10-year-old who has special needs, said getting to school on time is about more than just keeping up with the curriculum: It’s about getting physical therapy and medication.
“When a bus is late, all of those things go away or are delayed or disrupted,” she said. “The way we measure the success of momentum in transportation has to be really, really how you treat the most vulnerable folks who are getting on the bus.”
Emily Spatz can be reached at emily.spatz@globe.com. Follow her on X @emilymspatz.
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