It wasn’t smooth sailing for the first day of school in Prince George’s County.
As of Tuesday morning, bus routes still had not been assigned for 10,000 students, and the school district admitted it did not meet expectations.
“We’ve been with the school district, this is now our fifth year, and this is the worst I’ve ever seen it,” said parent Liz Chamberlain.
“Only to find out the day before school there’s no school bus, and so now we as grandparents, caretakers, moms and dads have to scramble, have to figure out what we’re going to do on the first day of school,” said grandparent Lynda Sidney.
Sidney said her grandson had been waiting for weeks for his very first day of kindergarten. She said his new chapter is now an unforgettable experience.
“He was looking forward to getting on the big yellow bus where the wheels go round and around, right,” she said. “This is what he’s telling us and so he was excited, and unfortunately that didn’t happen this morning.”
Sidney said after not receiving a bus assignment for the last three weeks or during orientation on Monday, she decided it was best to take her grandson to school to avoid transportation issues like the ones Chamberlain said her two kids experienced Tuesday.
As the mom of two Prince George’s County Public Schools (PGCPS) students, Chamberlain said she was relying on the school system’s bus tracking app Chipmunk to track the location of her kids’ bus.
“We decided to wait around 8 a.m. to drive because nothing showed up in the app, and actually the app wasn’t even working,” she said. “[…] We ended up waiting in line for about 30 minutes just to pull into the school campus, and then we were there for another 30 minutes. I eventually got our kids out and just walked them to the front door instead of waiting for the pick-up line.”
The school district has more 75,000 bus riders, according to PGCPS. At least 88% of students were routed Tuesday, leaving 12% without.
This means roughly 10,000 students are waiting to be assigned bus routes.
School leaders said they had a rough start Tuesday morning.
“The Chipmunk app did have a failure this morning; our message to families is we will do better,” Charoscar Coleman, chief operating officer for PGCPS, said. “[…] We didn’t meet our expectations today. Our goal is to have every student arrive on time and safely.”
PGCPS said the app failed due to the amount of subscribers that signed up for service in the last few days.
According to the school system, it is working to ensure students are assigned a bus route while augmenting their bus tracking system.
Until the problems are resolved, PGCPS offered this advice for families:
“The county is asking parents to go online and look up routes for buses near their homes until school leaders can properly assign their routes.”
Parents said after weeks of planning, they’re hoping for a safe and efficient solution for the rest of the year.
“The kids have a prosperous school year, you know, and that our kids can go into the education system safely learning,” Sidney said. “No harm no danger.”
