As bus service shrinks, frustrated parents and districts get creative to get kids to school

A bus driver shortage in Framingham this year has limited bus ridership for hundreds of students and upped absences. As families scramble to find alternate ways to get their kids to school, the district is now exploring other long-term fixes.

The district is short about 20 drivers of the roughly 80 it needs to operate yellow school buses for some 6,000 students, according to Framingham school officials.

"It’s really the toughest part knowing that there are students who haven’t come to school because we cannot transport them," said Lincoln Lynch IV, executive director of finance and operations for the Framingham Public Schools.

The bus system serves about two-thirds of the district's K-12 student population, Lynch said. But this year, the district limited service to meet the minimum requirements under state law, serving only sixth-graders and under who live farther than two miles from school.

Parents, like Marta Uzhca Nivicela, are struggling to cope with the sudden changes. Uzhca Nivicela's son attends Barbieri Elementary, which is about 1.5 miles from their home. She doesn't own a car, so Uzhca Nivicela walks her first-grader to school alongside a main road packed with rush-hour commuters.

"There are a lot of cars and a lot of kids," she said in Spanish, her native language. "I think that at any given time I could see an accident, because there’s too much traffic."

Their 40-minute walk crosses two busy intersections. And toward the end, the sidewalk narrows around a sharp curve in the road.

Uzhca Nivicela must squeeze in her son's morning drop-off with her own commute to work. She said she can’t afford to lose her job as a house cleaner, and at times must keep her son home when she can't get him to school without risking being late.

"He’s missed more than a week of school," Uzhca Nivicela said. "But I’m trying hard to make it work, because I know he’s falling behind in his classes."

Framingham school leaders said the district is aware the cuts to bus routes have caused a cascade of issues for families. Juliana Kessler Marcos, principal of Harmony Grove Elementary in downtown Framingham, said as the school year started, a wave of parents living just under the two-mile radius called her office for help.

"We received an abundance of phone calls begging and pleading with us," Kessler Marcos said. "Parents would say, 'This is too hard on my children. This is too hard on me. Please get us on a bus.'"

"We received an abundance of phone calls begging and pleading with us. [Parents] would say, 'This is too hard on my children. This is too hard on me. Please get us on a bus.'"

Juliana Kessler Marcos

Over the last two months, Lynch and his team managed to squeeze more students who live under the 2-mile cut-off onto yellow buses. At first, about 900 students lacked bus assignments. Lynch said the current waitlist is down to roughly 160 students.

"We want to transport as many people as we can," he said. "But down 20 drivers, it’s impossible to do that."

The school district's bus contractor, NRT Bus, said it is working hard to fill its 20 open driver positions, offering signing bonuses and covering commercial driver's license training costs.

"We remain in constant communication with our school districts and are utilizing additional resources to ensure that all students assigned to NRT's buses are transported safely to and from school,” a company spokesperson said in a statement.

Kessler Marcos said parents in Uzhca Nivicela's position — those without cars or flexible work schedules — face the worst impacts. She said some of them order ride-hailing services like Uber or Lyft to get their child to school, but those costs add up.

While Kessler Marcos and other school leaders said it's hard to know how many student absences were caused by the transportation issues, she added that absences often occur on days when there's bad weather or the school releases students early.

"Caregivers often have the only option of keeping their student at home — which can affect their employment and also affect their students' education," she said.

Framingham isn't the only district facing a bus driver shortage this year. The School Transportation Association of Massachusetts (STAM), an industry trade group, said nearly all members, which include school districts and private bus contractors, are grappling with driver shortages. Staffing is short anywhere from 10% to almost 40%.

The issue has steadily worsened over the last decade, according to STAM.

As some school transportation leaders worry about the impacts, especially for kids with fewer financial resources, several companies have sprouted up in recent years to provide alternatives solutions.

"It’s an equity problem, it’s a sustainability problem, it’s really an access to education problem," said Kimberly Moore, CEO and co-founder of the tech company Go Together.

The startup runs an online platform called CarpooltoSchool that connects families within a school district so they can coordinate carpools. It also helps school systems conduct background checks on parents that volunteer to drive or lead walking groups to schoolhouses.

Moore, who lives in Washington, D.C., started CarpooltoSchool in 2017, and it now serves schools in 26 states. In November, Framingham Public Schools plans to roll out the platform to district families.

In recent years, Moore said jobs that offer better benefits and more flexibility often lure younger commercial driver's license holders away from school bus driving, where pay ranges from $23-$30 an hour in Massachusetts.

Beyond partnering with CarpooltoSchool, Framingham also started giving middle and high school students free city bus passes this year. The MetroWest Regional Transit Authority added new bus stops near the schools, and according to Lynch, student ridership has increased.

"Our superintendent has actually been riding these buses to get a better understanding of how the schedules work," he said, "so he can help families understand the routes."

Lynch said he's hopeful changes allowed by the state's Registry of Motor Vehicles could incentivize more people to apply for bus driver positions. Next year, the RMV will begin offering its commercial driver's license permit test in Spanish and Portuguese.

"A lot of candidates can speak English, but they have a hard time reading it," said Tom Hamilton, executive director of STAM. "That’s going to increase the amount of people that can apply."

Framingham's three-year contract with NRT Bus ends in 2026. If the company can't fill its roster of drivers soon, district officials said they'll heavily consider buying and running a fleet of school buses when the contract expires. Worcester Public Schools made a similar move last year.

Still, Margie Ann Rosario, director of a Framingham advocacy group called Voices of the Community, said school leaders should do more to secure bus rides for students from low-income families.

"They have no choice in the actions that are being made upon them," she said. "The schools made that choice for them, but then they’re the ones that have to live with the consequence."

Rosario said she hopes Framingham Public Schools will consider basing who gets to ride the bus on a family’s financial needs, rather than only the child's age and distance from school.