Houston ISD administrators said they are working to assign bus routes to roughly 700 students after transportation issues complicated the first day of school for some families Monday morning.
HISD Superintendent Mike Miles said the 700 students enrolled in the district in the past few days and will receive bus assignments soon. About 17,000 other students have received routes, while the district’s roughly 165,000 other students don’t rely on district-provided transportation.
Some families expressed uncertainty about transportation ahead of the district’s opening day, when HISD rolled out changes to bus routes made over the summer.
The district began sending out new assigned routes to families last week, HISD said. Some families said they had not received their assignments the weekend before school started and experienced long delays on the phone lines HISD provided to resolve issues, according to the Houston Chronicle and KHOU.
The district’s main transportation line, 713-556-5963, went directly to voicemail when the Houston Landing called Monday afternoon. Miles said HISD plans to double the number of staff answering phones in the transportation call center Tuesday. He encouraged families to call their student’s school if they don’t receive a response on the main line.
Adding to the confusion, several parents received emails with incorrect information about their buses. In at least one instance, a family received messages for other children’s routes, according to an email provided to the Landing by the family. The problem was a “technology error,” Miles said, and families received accurate information via phone calls.
While some families criticized HISD for waiting until last week to assign routes, Miles argued it was necessary.
“Kids start enrolling, and they enroll all the way through next week. Routes, if you do it too early, you may have too many kids on a bus or too few kids on a bus,” he said. “You have to wait a little bit in order to make sure you have as many kids signed up as possible.”
HISD’s transportation changes include reducing the number of bus routes from about 500 to 420 and increasing the maximum distance families attending magnet schools would have to drive to reach a bus stop from two miles to three. The changes were made to save money and limit the amount of time students spend on buses, HISD said.
HISD says it will continue to make adjustments to bus lines over the next several weeks as families enroll their students.
At times, the state’s largest school district has struggled with rolling out transportation changes in the first days of the school year. In 2018, for example, multiple issues with a new transportation system left students across HISD without a ride to school or stranded on wayward buses.
Miles and HISD’s school board, who were appointed by Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath as part of state sanctions, are starting their second school year at the helm of the district.
Asher Lehrer-Small covers Houston ISD for the Landing. Reach him at asher@houstonlanding.org.
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