Jon England’s frustration with the Cleveland Metropolitan Schools District (CMSD) bussing department began on the first day of this school year when the bus skipped past his daughter’s stop.
He didn’t receive any notice that the bus wasn’t coming, he said, and his calls to the district’s transportation services went unanswered. Two days later, an employee sent him a message saying that, if a bus doesn’t show up, it’s up to a child’s parents to get them to school.
Since then, CMSD buses have missed both England’s daughter and son, who take different buses to different schools, at least nine times. He’s frustrated not just with missed and late pickups, he said, but a lack of communication from the district’s transportation department. He’s never gotten notified ahead of time about missed pickups, he said.
England and his wife have had to cut into their work hours waiting for buses that never showed up, he said.
“If they could just tell me right off the get-go they weren’t going to make it, then I would just take my kids and go about my day,” England said. “Even then, it’s an inconvenience, but it’s still better than waiting extra time and then calling.”
A statewide bus driver shortage
It’s unclear how often CMSD’s school buses miss picking up students. The district is responsible for getting about 15,000 students to school. Some take district buses. Some are picked up by contract transportation companies and others get free tickets to ride on RTA.
In February, Signal Cleveland asked the district for a record of all the missed pickups this school year, but the public records department did not respond.
CMSD, like many other Ohio school districts, has been struggling to hire enough bus drivers to cover all its routes. Earlier this school year, CMSD had to hire bus contractors to cover 29 routes because it was short drivers.
If a district doesn’t have enough bus drivers and substitutes, one call-off can cause a lot of problems. The bus driver who takes England’s son to school took some time off last October, and a substitute who wasn’t familiar with the route missed his son’s stop three days in a row, he said.
Other Ohio school districts are facing similar driver shortages, said Doug Palmer, senior transportation consultant for the Ohio School Boards Association. Citing a survey he helped conduct in 2023, Palmer said only about 10% of Ohio’s public school districts have enough drivers and substitute drivers to transport all their students.
“One driver short causes a bus not to run because there’s no one in the background to fill that spot, right?” Palmer said. “Most districts, right now, on a daily basis, are having mechanics and office staff drive buses just to fill the vacancies.”
When one driver calls off, it can cause a ripple effect of missed stops and delays – and students missing school. CMSD has struggled to keep its attendance rates up. During the last school year, more than half of the students were chronically absent, meaning they missed around 18 days of school or more.
At the beginning of the school year, CMSD had 175 drivers on staff, according to staffing records from September of 2024. Columbus City Schools, which enrolls about 10,000 more students than CMSD, had more than 400 drivers at the beginning of this school year.
How does CMSD track its buses?
CMSD’s buses have been less reliable this year than in the past, England said. The missed and late pickups have whittled down his trust in the district, he said. Especially because he has to call to let dispatchers know when a bus skips his children, he doubts how well the district tracks its buses.
“I’m fully convinced that if there was an emergency, and I needed to get my child off the bus, that if I called the bus garage, they wouldn’t know where that bus was at,” he said. “What if they got into an accident? How would they even know it?”
The district has an app parents can download to track the location of their children’s buses, but England said it isn’t reliable. The bus tracker can go offline for a variety of reasons, according to the transportation department. If a bus breaks down and a driver has to use a spare bus or the district has to call in a contractor to pick up a student, the tracker won’t work.
Dispatchers use GPS systems to track buses, a spokesperson for the transportation department said in an email. It’s unclear if those systems show the same information parents see on the bus tracker app. Dispatchers can also radio bus drivers to check their location.
Does CMSD notify parents if a bus isn’t going to show up?
In response to a question about CMSD’s procedure for notifying parents about missed or late pickups, the spokesperson said communications go out through the district’s bus app. When a bus misses a student, dispatchers enter it into a log and coordinate with a parent to send out another bus, the spokesperson said.
England said the app does notify parents if a bus is running late, for instance if weather is bad, but he said he’s never gotten a message when the bus isn’t going to show up. He’s always had to call to let dispatchers know after a bus misses his children’s stops. Sometimes he’s able to quickly reach dispatchers, he said, but he’s been left on long holds and waited hours for callbacks other times.
Different transportation department employees have given him conflicting answers about CMSD’s procedures for missed pickups.
“It seems to vary depending on who answers the phone,” he said.
‘We have to go to work just like they have to go to work’
The messages England gets when the bus is running late usually aren’t helpful. His children ride two different buses, and the messages don’t specify which bus will be late. Sometimes, the messages come after a bus is already late, he said, or they don’t come at all.
“It’s few and far between, but they’ve started putting these notes in that just say, ‘Bus is 20 minutes late,’” England said. “But you don’t know which bus it is.”
When the bus skipped his son’s stop one morning last October, England waited on hold with the transportation department for about a half hour before someone on the other end hung up, he said. He had to call in sick for his son because he and his wife were both working.
“I feel like sometimes, the district forgets that they’re dealing with parents and with kids that, you know, we also have lives,” England said. “We have to live, and we have to go to work just like they have to go to work.”
