When we last left this saga with Columbus City Schools taking three hours to bring our daughters home with no notice, we had emailed the superintendent and the school board about what happened to our family last Friday. The superintendent had replied to the email agreeing that the incident was inexcusable and let us know he had asked the deputy superintendent and director of transportation to investigate and follow up with us.

The next day, as I was driving to pick the kids up from school (Mira had asked that I pick them up that day, saying she was still a little nervous to ride the bus home for fear of being on it for another three hours), my phone rang. I recognized it as a Columbus City Schools phone number, but it wasn’t the number for our school, so I ignored it because I was driving. When I arrived at the school, I listened to the message – it was from their customer service department, asking to speak about the transportation/communications screw up on Friday. I texted Aaron and found out that they had called him as well.

He spoke to the customer service representative. She apologized for the incident and then tried to shift the blame onto the school, especially the principal, for “not realizing” that the kids would be on the bus for so long and notifying parents that two bus routes were combined. I was livid when I heard this.

Look, I don’t place even half an ounce of blame on the school. They have always been amazing and the communication between our school and us has been exemplary. The school didn’t make the decision to combine routes, and they don’t have easy access to the route maps to see how that combined route would take the kids into all four quadrants of the city of Columbus. The school’s principal is responsible for the school – her job is not transportation, nor should it be. That’s why they have an entire department for transportation.

And now that I’ve brought up that department…let’s discuss what happened next. After that call, Aaron then received a call from the director of transportation to set up a meeting. We agreed to meet on Wednesday morning, right after our annual IEP meeting.

I know – transportation meeting right after the IEP meeting. Talk about an intense morning, right?

The director of transportation began by apologizing and stating that they had failed on Friday. He showed us the route for the bus our kids take, as well as the route they combined with on Friday. That second route covered a large portion of the other side of Columbus. It’s easy to see why it took so long, considering they received a tour of the entire city, but didn’t excuse why we weren’t notified, given the chance to pick up our children, and couldn’t get through to the transportation phone number.

He explained that they have no ability to contact parents in these cases. What?? They have no robo-call technology, or any technology to send out emails or texts. They do have a Twitter account that is not publicized on their website (@ccsbuses) but he admitted that they don’t respond to anyone tweeting them and when they’re short on staff or really busy – times when you’d likely need the Twitter account the most – they don’t update it. I checked the account – last Friday, they listed some buses running late, but ours was never listed.

So why did no one answer when we tried calling over and over last Friday? Because no one was there. They were so short on drivers that the entire office staff were out driving the buses, leaving one person (the director) to be dispatcher to all of the buses carrying thousands of students, and answer a phone if he had time.

Here are some facts I learned about the Columbus City Schools Transportation. On any given day, they transport over 32,000 students to and from schools. They have over 800 buses that do this. But in their office, do you know how many call center operators and bus dispatchers they have to manage those enormous numbers?

Four call center operators, and two dispatchers.

And that’s on a good day when no one is being called to go drive a bus at the last minute. Think about that for a minute. Four operators for 32,000 students and two dispatchers to stay in touch with 800 buses.

A friend on Twitter did some of the math for me to prove the absurdity of this: if 2% of parents need to call the call center any given morning or afternoon, that is roughly 640 calls. Spread between four representatives, that is 160 calls per representative, almost all of which will likely arrive in a one hour window. It’s obvious that there simply are not enough people available for parents to have any reasonable expectation of reaching someone in a timely manner.

It turns out the district does have a Lost Child number to call, but that number is not published. I asked why it wasn’t published, and the answer was because if parents had access to that number, they would call it whenever they couldn’t get through to the regular number. (Perhaps because they need to FIND THEIR CHILD?) Can you see the problems here?

The director of transportation did share with us some of the technology they have partially running at the moment. All buses are equipped with GPS tracking devices. However, the district deems it too costly to provide parents their own individual logins to the software to check in on where their child’s bus might be.

I was given a login to see how the system works yesterday, and after using it last night while my daughters rode the bus home I can declare that it’s not ready for prime time by any means. The software is glitchy and unreliable. It logged me out several times while checking. If a bus is not on the mapped out route – say they take a different street to avoid construction, for example – the system reports that the bus is not running its assigned route.

If it worked reliably, it might be useful.

If the bus stops for 60 seconds or more, it disappears from the map with no last location displayed and only displaying the student’s drop-off location, losing all sense of where it was. Since buses are using city streets, with traffic lights that often last more than 60 seconds, it’s impossible to see where the bus is on the tracking map unless you catch it at just the right time.

Also, should there be any mechanical issues where they have to swap a bus out for another bus, it’s unable to track the route because they can’t reprogram the software to assign the route to the new bus. The software also has no ability to display messages for the route, updating parents on any potential issues that could cause a delay.

We also learned that about half of the buses are equipped with RFID readers, and they had an idea to assign RFID cards to students and then track them on the bus. In this system, parents would be able to log in on a smartphone app to see where and when their students swiped the card when getting on the bus, and where and when they swiped it getting off the bus. This system also requires funding, though, and at this moment there’s no guarantee it’ll happen.

So there are some half-done technology solutions in place, but half-done is nearly the same as not done at all – the only difference is for half-done, money has been invested to still have no solution.

At one point I mentioned that no parent should ever have to resort to calling the police to find their child’s bus. I was then shocked to hear them say they work with the police a few times a year for these types of issues and they’re grateful for the help the police provide. Ummm…I could be totally wrong about this, but I’m not so sure the police are as grateful to serve as the district’s response system and safety net when parents can’t get through.

The message we received from this meeting over and over was that the transportation department has no funding to improve services and that their hands are tied regarding communication and safety improvements for their office. He stressed several times that they have been asking other school districts how they manage their communications issues regarding transportation, and have also reached out to non-school places like the airport for their ideas on logistics.

It took a little while after that meeting for me to process everything I’d heard and tie it all together. Once I did, I realized that there are some enormous problems at play here that the school district can’t keep ignoring.

It’s obscene and shameful that the largest school district in the state of Ohio, and the 8th largest in the entire U.S., has such limited resources for their transportation department. There are plenty of smaller districts that have more call center operators to help parents and better technology to assist in making sure everyone is aware of where the students are at all times once they get on those buses.

After we met, I realized that several times it was mentioned that they were looking to other school districts and transportation services, asking them for solutions. I was also told yesterday that they met with the company who provides the GPS technology for the buses shortly after meeting with us to discuss the problems with the software and ways to improve it.

But wait – if they knew of the problems with the software, why did they wait until now to start asking for fixes? If I’m paying for a big piece of software, I’d be asking for changes as we discovered any limitations. And why are they just now looking for ways to improve the entire system? They didn’t JUST start moving students around by bus these past few weeks – they’ve been managing transportation for some time. Surely our bus issue last Friday didn’t suddenly open their eyes to flaws in the system. They’ve known about these flaws for some time, but perhaps it took an angry parent to make them start addressing it?

Columbus City Schools prides itself on teaching children to be leaders and innovators, and yet their own administration is failing at doing just that. Asking other school districts how they do things is fine, but really, shouldn’t larger school districts be the pioneers for creative, proactive solutions that allow them to work smarter, not harder, and put technology to use to help deal with limited funding? They shouldn’t be following behind other districts, begging for ideas, but should rather use their own resources and talents to blaze ahead and create successful models for other districts to follow.

One final point: in November there is a controversial school levy on the ballot. It’s asking Columbus residents for a steep increase in property taxes to fund building improvements, academic initiatives to improve test scores (’cause only test scores matter with Common Core and the state report cards), and, sadly and unfortunately, provide money to select private charter schools, despite the entire reason charter schools were approved was because they wouldn’t take additional public funding.

I’ve read the tax levy wording and inspected the detailed breakdown on the district’s website. Nowhere does it specify any dedicated additional funding for Transportation. If the charter school issue hadn’t swayed my opinion of the levy before now, this issue may have made up my mind and set my course on which side to advocate passionately for.

Before we left on Wednesday, Aaron and I both expressed that we didn’t want to be against the district on pushing for new policies and procedures for better communications with transportation, but would rather be advocates alongside them. We’ve echoed the same sentiments to the superintendent and school board. Our words were met with polite courtesy in our meeting, but I’m not sure they were fully accepted. I drove the point home before we left, though, letting them know I will remain in touch and this issue will not drop until changes are made.

And it won’t drop. We’ve already emailed the superintendent and school board again regarding what we learned in our meeting with the director of transportation, and our expectations from here. I have a few weeks before the next school board meeting, and will start gathering up as much data as possible.

It’s time to request budgets and deconstruct them line-by-line. Time to call other school districts and find out how they allocate transportation funding. This isn’t my job – and it shouldn’t be my job, because OMG I have enough to do already – but if a squeaky wheel is required to force some changes so parents can have some peace of mind about their children riding buses home from school? Consider me your loud, angry, squeaky wheel. I’d rather use our situation, which thankfully turned out well in the end, to enact change rather than wait for a situation where the ending isn’t so happy to make the district put the time and resources into solutions.

I’d love to hear in the comments (or email me if you don’t feel comfortable leaving a comment: amommystory at gmail dot com) more of what other districts do to keep your kids safe? What types of services would you expect to see from a school district’s transportation department if you needed to find your kids or if the bus was running very late or had trouble?

(And if anyone in this district wants to help me spread the word far & wide or help prepare a presentation for the school board, I’m happy to accept help!)

On Thursday morning I took a flight to Atlanta for the Type-A Parent Conference. This was the first time I’ve attended Type-A, and I was so excited to attend. I had planned to write a post for today about my conference experience, sharing fun photos with friends and some of what I learned, but then something happened late on Friday afternoon that changed my plans for today.

When I left Columbus, I prepared everything as best I could to make it easy on Aaron for solo-parenting for a few days. I set out clothing for the kids for each day. I also arranged for my mom to come to get the kids off the bus on Friday so Aaron wouldn’t need to leave work early.

On Friday afternoon, I confirmed with my mom at 3:30pm via text that she would be at our house by 4:15 to get the kids, who usually were off the bus between 4:30-4:45. She was already in town, near our house, and would be there in plenty of time.

I went back to my day at Type-A, confident that everything was being handled. So when I got a text from my mom at 5:18pm, I thought it would be her telling me the kids were home, or asking if Cordy could play on the XBox or some other simple request. Instead, it was this:

“How late should the kids be? They aren’t here yet.”

Even with the bus issues we’ve had so far this year, the bus had never been later than 4:50pm. It was nearly half an hour past that. (Their “official” drop-off time is supposed to be 4:15pm.)

Realizing the time, I was a little worried but wondered if perhaps my mom had missed a call from Columbus City Schools Transportation. In the past, they’ve used robo-calls to let parents know when bad traffic was slowing buses, or the driver has called us if the bus had mechanical trouble. The drivers have emergency phone contacts for all kids they transport.

I called my mom and asked her to check the answering machine. No message. She told me she had already contacted Aaron and he was trying to contact Transportation to find out where our kids were. I asked her to text me as soon as they got home, expecting this was just a case of bad traffic or a sub driver and they’d be home any second.

But.

But the fears started in my head. Why weren’t they home yet? They did get on the bus, right? I decided I’d help in the effort, calling Transportation myself. The phone rang and rang and rang. No answer, no connection to the usual holding queue – just ring after ring for nearly ten minutes, until it abruptly cut off and disconnected.

Did they all go home before all kids were safely at their homes? I hadn’t received another text from my mom, so they still weren’t home and it was now approaching an hour later than the late time they are usually home.

I was really worried now. I called my mom again to see if they had shown up. Still nothing, and no word on where they could be. The panic was slowly rising as I did my best to force it down and focus on what I could do to find my girls.

What could I do? I was three states away. I felt utterly helpless and frightened. So I went into full-court press, reaching out for help on social media:

@ColsCitySchools My two daughters are still not home from school & bus was due over an hr ago. Transportation isn’t answering. Please help!

— Christina McMenemy (@mommystory) September 27, 2013

I also looked up the school district’s directory and called the main office for the district. Still no answer. I tried Transportation again, and again had no answer.

I was supposed to go out to dinner with a group at the conference. With the panic now firmly taking hold of me, I choked back tears and waved them to go on without me as I returned to my hotel room, clutching my cell phone tightly, eyes glued on my only link to the drama back home.

My mom called again, asking if I’d heard anything. It was now 6pm, two and a half hours since the school day ended. I told her I couldn’t get through to anyone. “I don’t like this at all,” my mom said. “Do you think we should call the police?”

“Yes,” I replied without hesitation, suddenly realizing it was the last option we had left. My kids were missing, no one from the district was available to tell us where they were or if they even made it onto the bus. The school district had failed us at this point – the police were the next logical step. “Call the police and tell them exactly what happened and ask for their help.”

I held it together until I got into my room. I called Aaron next, confirming that he was just as worried. I told him about calling the police, and he agreed it was the right thing to do. He was racing home from work to join my mom.

My mom then called to tell me the police were at our house and wanted to get a description of the kids. Did I know what they were wearing today? The tears started coming and there was no stopping them now. Our children were missing, and I couldn’t remember the clothing I set out for them on Wednesday night. Why could I not remember what I picked for them to wear?

I sobbed as I apologized for not remembering, as if having my children go missing was something I could have expected. The police were treating this as a missing child case, which frightened me even more. As I tried to catch my breath between sobs, I heard the police officer thank my mom for the details and say that he’d let her know as soon as they heard something.

My mom didn’t have any other details from the police. I hung up so her phone would be available in case they called and then I called Aaron again. He was getting close to home, cursing at the traffic in his way.

Maybe the kids fell asleep on the bus and the driver didn’t see them and took the bus back to the garage with them in it? Or what if it was a sub driver who let them off at the wrong stop and they didn’t know where they were? Maybe they didn’t even make it onto the bus and someone took them? Or what if the bus had an accident and no one had seen the wreck yet? Each scenario running through our minds was worse than the next.

Aaron decided to try calling Children’s Services to see if the girls somehow ended up there. I sat in my hotel room, three states away, staring at my phone through my tears as I waited for news, completely broken.

Then, right at 6:30pm, three hours after our two girls finished their school day, the call from Aaron: the police found their bus, and they were about five minutes from our house. I let out that deep breath I’d been holding in for almost two hours, the grip around my heart released as I was relieved to know they were almost home. The police were able to use some super-secret-police-number to contact Transportation and make someone give them an update on the bus route. Had I been at home, I probably would have offered the officer any amount of money to gain access to that number for future reference.

But they found the bus, there was some kind of issue with the bus that caused it to be so late, and it would be there any minute. Thank goodness.

“They’re here,” Aaron then said. “I’ll call you right back so you can talk to the girls.” I held the phone with both hands and locked my gaze on the screen again as I waited, only this time it was for the anticipation of hearing my daughters’ voices, voices I wasn’t 100% sure I’d hear again a little while before that. It feels overly dramatic to write that now, but there was a short period of time – a short period that felt much longer, as if time was standing still and yet running out all at once – where we weren’t sure if this was a terrible communication misstep by the district or something even worse.

My phone rang again, and I anxiously answered. “Talk to your daughters,” Aaron instructed.

“Hi mommy! I miss you!” Mira’s voice was sparkling and beautiful to my ears. “We were on the bus for a REALLY long time!”

“I know!” I laughed through the tears, “That was the longest bus ride ever!”

Cordy, as usual, didn’t waste words: “Hi mommy! I’m alive!” I have no idea if anyone told her we were worried, if she picked up on it from seeing my mom and Aaron, or if she thought she was being funny, but her cheery proclamation of living helped dissipate the remaining fears hovering over my head.

Once I knew our kids were safe, my mind switched to wanting to know what happened? Why were they on a bus for three hours? Why were we not notified?

Aaron had spoken with the driver, who wasn’t the usual driver, but was a driver we’ve seen before. The story was that there was a family issue with the usual afternoon driver, so her route was added to this driver’s route to get the kids home. (Remember that our girls route was already a double route due to the driver shortage at the start of the year, so it was really three routes in one.)  Thankfully, the police remained at our house until the kids were home and they spoke with the driver to get a report.

Aaron asked the driver why she didn’t call us to let us know the situation. She said she expected that Transportation would have called all of the families to let them know. No one got a call.

Allow me to repeat: no parent or guardian received a call to let them know that there was a bus issue and that due to this issue their child might be arriving home much, much later than normal.

It’s inexcusable. I’d rather receive an extra call to make sure I was aware rather than no call at all.

First, parents should always be notified if there’s going to be any significant change in a bus route or arrival time. There’s a reason they make us turn in emergency contact forms, in duplicate, at the start of each year.

They have our numbers, so there’s no reason we shouldn’t be contacted for these types of issues. Safety and communication should be the guiding principals for transportation.

Parents need to know when to expect their children so that we feel secure that our children are being transported in a safe manner. Otherwise, we have no assurance that our children are coming home safely. When it was close to 6pm, and we had no communication from the district regarding our children’s bus route, we didn’t feel our children were in a safe place. Buses don’t take that long to get home. There was no advance warning of a delay, and there was no one available when we tried to call to find out where our kids were. Calling the police really was the only option available.

Also, when a situation like this comes up, parents should be notified as soon as possible and given the option to pick up their children instead of forced into an absurdly long trip home. If we had received a call that our kids were going to be on a three hour bus ride, I would have sent my mom to the school to pick them up instead. I’d never willingly let my nine and six year old girls sit on a school bus for three hours. Had they called the parents, several parents might have been able to pick up their children, leading to a shorter bus route for those who had to remain on the bus. And those who did remain on the bus wouldn’t have had parents waiting nervously at home, worried about where their kids were.

Finally, the school district let these kids down, big-time. This was an elementary school bus with mostly special needs kids on it. No child should have to sit on a hot bus for three hours without bathroom privileges, but special needs children may have additional issues that make this type of treatment especially inhumane. They may not understand why they’re being held there so long. They may get anxious that they won’t reach their home. (Cordy told me today that she was scared they’d never be taken home when she was on that bus.) They may have medical issues that could be affected by that long of a drive.

I am angry that I had to go through that kind of soul-crushing worry because of a lack of accountability on the part of the Columbus school district. No parent should have to endure that wait without any communication from the district, and no child should be forced to sit on a bus for three hours. I don’t know what protocols the school district has in place at the moment, but they failed miserably on Friday.

Aaron has already emailed the superintendent, asking for a meeting to discuss ways to prevent any parent from having to go through this again. The superintendent responded late today, agreeing that it was unacceptable and letting us know the deputy superintendent or director of transportation would be in touch soon. Hopefully they will be, or I’ll soon be in touch with them. I expect a meeting with these officials to discuss potential policy changes.

I’d like to see a parent and student bill of rights for the district’s transportation system, with procedures in place to handle unexpected bus issues. There should be a team of people to reach out to parents for any issues, offer alternatives if time permits, and keep the process running as smoothly as possible.

The Transportation office needs to have people available to answer calls each day until every last child has been dropped off at home and the buses all report that they’re empty. And alternative plans should be in place, rather than combining multiple routes, to ensure that no child is stuck on a bus for three hours, or even two hours.

The school district should take a stand to forbid any route from taking longer than one hour, with a maximum of one and a half hours for occasions when issues crop up. If you can’t get them all home within one and a half hours, you must divide it up or reach out to parents ahead of time to see if anyone would rather pick their child up at school.

I don’t think I overreacted at all. When there was no sign of my young children or word on their whereabouts three hours after they left the school, I was justified in freaking out. I’m thankful that everything was okay, but I’m also angry that it ruined my evening and scared my children. It’s an experience I never want to go through again, and I’d like to make sure no other parent or student in the Columbus City School District has to go through it, either.

Update: I did meet with the director of Transportation for Columbus City Schools. That meeting and the disappointing outcome was detailed in a later post.