During his first 90 days, Prince George’s County Public Schools (PGCPS) new superintendent, Millard House II, acknowledged persistent challenges in the area of student transportation, and called for a transportation audit. That audit was conducted September through December 2023 and the administration plans to implement changes based on its results as soon as August.
For the 2024-2025 school year, there will be five changes for PGCPS students:
1. Standardized bell times
2. Bus stops are moving
3. Reassessment of bus stops in walk zones
4. Ridership assessments and tracking
5. Better tracking
Standardized Times
Standard start times have been announced as 7:30 a.m., 8:30 a.m. and 9:30 a.m. Those times were said to correspond to elementary, middle and high schools respectively but PGCPS has since removed that part of the announcement. The new start and end bell times for each school will be available this month, at the latest by the April 25 board of education meeting. The goal of standardizing bell times is to improve efficiency and to allow an hour between multiple different runs using a single vehicle and/or driver. The transportation audit stated that aligning bell times could reduce trips from the current 1,008 a day to 889. “This substantial decrease of 119 vehicles would significantly reduce the current driver shortage and produce robust cost savings. At a current cost of $779.74 per vehicle per day, the district could save up to $92,000 per day and $16.9 million annually through bell time optimization,” it reported. For more on changing bell times, see the article on p. 8.
Moving Stops
Currently a third of students have bus stops within 0.1 mile of their home, reported PGCPS executives at the March Board of Education meeting. They plan to extend walking times to stops in order to reduce ride times on the buses. PGCPS policy allows for stops to be located up to 1.5 miles away for elementary school students and 2 miles for middle- and high-school students and those attending specialty schools. The transportation audit suggests a model that will have the average student travelling approximately 0.5 mile to their bus stop.
Walk Zones
A walk zone is the area around a school within which students are considered walkers and not eligible for bus transportation. Under PGCPS policies that means elementary school students living within 1.5 miles of their school and middle- and high-school students living within 2 miles of their school. “Each day we transport thousands of students residing within the walk zone; 26 percent of [the] total transported population,” said COO Charoscar Coleman. According to the transportation audit, 86 percent of those being transported by bus within walk zones are elementary school students. The audit revealed over 22,000 bus riders across 178 schools are being picked up within walk zones. “These walk boundary exceptions come at an extraordinary cost to the district,” stated the audit. “Prince George’s County Public Schools would save more than $40 million annually if no walk boundary exceptions were granted. The district incurs a cost of more than $23 million annually from transporting elementary students who reside within their school walk boundary and an additional $17 million annually from transporting middle and high school students who reside within their school walk boundary.”
At the presentation before the March Board of Education meeting, Board Member Pamela Boozer-Strother (District 3) expressed concerns about talking in terms of cost savings. Creating safe passages is going to require investment elsewhere, and “it’s going to be expensive,” she warned. “We have these bus routes because these walk paths are dangerous,” said Boozer-Strother. “We know why there’s a bus even though it’s close to school; it’s because of the six- to eight-lane Route 1 or 202,” she told the administration. “The reality is that this is going to create a parent transportation system that we already have, that is already really dangerous in our neighborhoods. Our fully walkable schools have a parent transportation system and it is traffic and it is management and it’s not safe.” Boozer-Strother argued that turning around the pattern of parents driving individual students to school is part of the climate change action plan and health and wellness plans, but she foresaw an increase in such traffic with the removal of bus services to those walk zones, something she sees as dangerous.
Board Member Jonathan Briggs (District 2, including Greenbelt) mentioned the proposed Greenbelt East Trail and efforts to create safe walking paths around Greenbelt Road. He suggested PGCPS partner with other organizations to create and utilize such routes.
Coleman said each walk zone stop audit will generate data that can be shared with partners – need for crossing guards, traffic calming measures, etc.
Tracking Ridership
Forty-one percent of seats on the average school bus trip are unoccupied, say PGCPS administrators. They plan to use “opt-in” and “opt-out” strategies to detect nonriders sooner and “document students who are chronic no-shows.” Board Member Briggs expressed concern that an “opt-in” process is less inclusive than an “opt-out” one. Superintendent House said they are planning an opt-out system beginning in August and may move toward an opt-in system in phase two (which will commence in the 2025-2026 school year).
At the school board meeting there was no discussion of the factors leading to students becoming “chronic no-shows” at their bus stops but over recent years some parents have found it necessary to drive their children to school when buses regularly don’t arrive or arrive so late it’s disruptive to students’ attendance and parents’ work.
Tracking Buses
The final part of the new transportation changes is a “Track in the App” and effective communication process. Currently bus drivers have reported at school board meetings that their technology has been buffering or not connecting, making it impossible for them to connect to the system relaying their location and progress to waiting parents, students and administrators. The administration said that the Stopfinder App that the county uses is unable to track “double-runs” where a driver takes on more than one route (currently the average number of routes per day per vehicle for PGCPS is 2.71). Asked by board members why they were continuing to use the seemingly universally despised Stopfinder App, the administration suggested improvements in other areas will mean fewer doubled routes and that they plan a “rebranding.” However, the suggestion of fewer doubled routes seems contradicted by the statements that the bell times are being spaced specifically to allow for doubled routes.
Several board members pushed back on continuing to use Stopfinder and this was the most controversial of the changes for the board. Boozer-Strother asked if there’s something new “to raise that level of confidence” in the app and Director of Transportation Keba Baldwin said they would “open up” more options in the app to use capabilities they hadn’t yet. Boozer-Strother asked what they’d held back because they said they were doing that before and COO Coleman pointed to reducing doubled runs so it would work more efficiently.
Board Member Branndon Jackson (District 6) said he wanted to go on record saying the people don’t want Stopfinder. “I don’t know what rebranding we can do. No. We need to look for other opportunities … There’s other companies out there … I just want to go on record so my community knows that I’m saying that we don’t want Stopfinder,” he said.
Coleman responded that the administration could consider alternatives in 2025-2026 but didn’t want to change too much and “leave our community behind.” “I feel like we’re already behind with Stopfinder,” retorted Jackson.
Vice Chair of the Board Lolita Walker (District 9) said, “I think every community has heard about Stopfinder. As a parent I’m on the picket line about Stopfinder myself.” She asks that PGCPS carefully communicate the optimization of a tool that “we already know parents are beside themselves about.” She told the administration they’d have to educate the public when they “keep things the same that aren’t necessarily working.”
Board Member Kenneth Harris (District 7) agreed, “Our communities do not want Stopfinder,” but he believed changing it was not a conversation they could have at this point.
Info Sessions Coming
Communications Director Meghan Thornton gave a presentation on a communication and engagement plan. The plan includes information sessions throughout the county, with one in every district “to inform and educate” the public about the coming changes.
All five of these priorities will be implemented in “phase one” of the transportation changes, school year 2024-2025, which begins in August. Additional changes arising from the transportation audit and its suggestions are yet to be announced but a phase two of changes is planned for school year 2025-2026. Discussion indicated later changes might include an “opt-in” ridership model and multimodal transportation beyond school buses.
The author has two children who attend Prince George’s County Public Schools.