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Hillsborough Parents Fume At School Bus Chaos

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By MARILYN BROWN

The Tampa Tribune

Published: August 21, 2008

Updated: 08/21/2008 12:44 am

TAMPA - This year's problems with Hillsborough County school buses go beyond late notices to parents of bus stops.

The phone system that was jammed last weekend before the start of the school year was still jammed with calls Wednesday, some bus drivers don't have enough work while others are swamped and parents are struggling to figure out how to get their children to and from school or to after-school care.

Some parents who couldn't get through to the district call center by phone drove to the call center in Thonotosassa to get answers Wednesday.

"Out of all the years my children have been in school, I have never seen it so chaotic," said Wendy Pressly, whose 7-year-old son was put on the wrong bus home Wednesday. After she couldn't get through by phone, Pressly spent more than two hours at the call center trying to get bus schedules straightened out for her three children.

"It's been one mess behind the other," she said when she left the office after 6 p.m., still needing to call back today to get more information on her 14-year-old daughter's bus. "I don't usually drink, but I think I want a glass of wine."

Last week, Superintendent MaryEllen Elia "profusely" apologized to parents for a delay in sending out bus information, saying she took responsibility. The district opened phone lines from 4 a.m. to at least 9 p.m. through the weekend. Still, there were only eight people answering the calls, and lines rang busy or put callers on extended hold.

Jack Davis, the district's chief information and technology officer who oversees the transportation department, said late Wednesday he could not say whether this year is any worse than past years but noted that big changes were made in three more areas this year after a rough rollout in south Hillsborough last year. Three more areas are in line next year.

"This is a bigger change than last year," he said. "It's three times as many."

"We've got an inadequate telephone infrastructure here," Davis said late Wednesday, acknowledging hundreds of calls were coming in and people were still waiting on hold. "The call volume exceeded the expectations."

But bus drivers said this year is tough, even for a second day of school.

"In my 22 years of driving, this has never been this way," said Eleanora Hopkins, vice president of communications for the Hillsborough School Employees Federation. "To me, it's not organized."

Hopkins transports disabled students to and from Valrico Elementary and Tomlin Middle schools. Her 65-passenger bus to Tomlin had two students and her Valrico bus had 15.

In the past, drivers of exceptional education students got a list of students, then called parents to arrange transportation, she said. Now it's done at the central office, and some parents have yet to get transportation.

"We're having parents come up to our windows and asking when we're going to start picking up their kids," Hopkins said.

"We have areas where there are not enough drivers and regions where there are too many drivers and not enough routes," Hopkins said. The district has had a critical driver shortage for years.

The district will move drivers to areas in need, Davis said. "They're working through it. It's all part of leveling loads."

With about 1,000 buses on the road and 90,000 students riding twice a day, late buses and parents late on gathering information are typical. This year it has been magnified by the district's effort to be more efficient by cutting the number of bus stops and eliminating transportation to most students who live within two miles of their school unless there are verified hazards.

Also eliminated: transportation to most for-profit after-school care and after-school programs that are not within the school's attendance boundary.

Families are protesting and sharing makeshift shuttles to get their children to parks after school.

"We had a pitchfork-and-torch meeting Monday," said Steven Fay, parent of a 10-year-old daughter at Maniscalco Elementary in Lutz. "We're not going to give up."

Fay and other parents were protesting with signs at Maniscalco on Wednesday and running shuttles with their own vans to the after-school program at Nye Park, about two miles from the school. Sixty-two Maniscalco students attend the program, which is free except for a $50 summer charge and a fee for nonschool days.

Fay said he did talk to the district's transportation chief, John Franklin.

"He said he simply didn't have enough drivers," Fay said. But the district is offering parents a bus to take the students to a recreation center more than seven miles away instead because it is in the school's attendance zone.

Hillsborough County has 42 after-school programs, some in schools and some very near schools, said John Brill, public information officer for the Parks, Recreation and Conservation Department. He didn't know how many students are losing school district transportation to those programs.

"Actually, the district didn't let us know" about the plan to cut transportation, Brill said. "We found out because a parent had a letter."

Davis said if the district takes the Maniscalco students to Nye Park, the closer program outside the school's boundaries, it will have to do the same for other schools with the same issue.

"The issue is standards," he said. "The same standards have to be applied everywhere."

Parents don't want to lose services they're used to, Davis said, but the district has to take them to save money and be more efficient.

Those answers don't seem to make much difference to parents who can't even reach anybody on the phone or get changes made at schools.

"It's chaos after chaos," said Janice Dean, both a Hillsborough bus driver for 13 years and a parent with a problem with her daughter's bus stop.

Since last week, Dean said she had been trying to get through at the district call center at all hours. She also submitted an online form, but had received no response.

Her 10-year-old daughter, Joanna, has a new bus stop this year that Dean considers dangerous. She must walk along busy Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, which has a big ditch but no sidewalks.

Dean drives her daughter to Dover Elementary, one of the two schools on her route. But in the afternoon, her route doesn't include her own neighborhood. So her 80-year-old father is picking her up at the bus in the afternoon as Dean tries to get the stop changed.

"I can't get through to nobody," she said Wednesday night. When parents tell her they can't get answers, "I tell them, I'm in the same boat you are."

Reporter Marilyn Brown can be reached at (813) 259-8069 or mbrown@tampatrib.com.

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