CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA (CVILLE RIGHT NOW) – A communication mix-up has some Albemarle County students and their families scrambling for a ride to school ahead of the first day of classes.
Parents said the school division failed to communicate the procedure for adding students who are transitioning from elementary school to middle school or middle school to high school and who need bus service for the first time to the bus schedule.
“There would always be reminders in the summer for parents to check PowerSchool and make sure that certain selections were in their profile, and there were none of those messages this year,” said Andrea Zimmerman, whose youngest child does not have a bus assignment for Wednesday’s start at Journey Middle School. “We realized after I saw a message on Facebook on the Journey page said that someone’s kid didn’t have an assignment. Then I checked and realized one of my kids didn’t have an assignment.”
The Zimmermans contacted the school Thursday to try to remedy the situation. Their older child has taken the bus to Journey for the past two years, but their youngest is in limbo.
According to ACPS spokesperson Jennifer Butler, the school division had identified 29 students who are transitioning from walk zones at four different schools to becoming bus riders who don’t have a spot on the bus rosters.
Butler said the division contacted those families by email on Monday evening. She said families for 20 of those students requested bus transportation after the Aug. 1 deadline, while nine have not contacted ACPS about transportation at all.
“We are aware that some families of students entering middle or high school this year are without bus assignments for the start of school,” Butler told Cville Right Now. “While this is a relatively small number of students compared to our overall ridership, we regret that any family is starting the year without transportation in place. We remain committed to resolving these requests as quickly as possible and to reviewing our internal processes to help prevent situations like this in the future.”
ACPS’s response apparently did not account for students who were car riders last year and now need bus service, but were unaware of the procedure.
The school’s transportation website page has now been updated to include the policy, but that update was not on the page in July.
“We were told there were lots of kids who were coming from the elementary school who did not have the check in their profile,” Zimmerman said. “I think it’s simply that the reminders didn’t go out.”
Some families told Cville Right Now they had not received any email or text messages regarding transportation in over a year, when a message in June advised families of a bus driver shortage.
Others said they had checked forms sent home by their elementary school indicating their children needed bus service, only to find out that communication did not get their children on the bus list.
According to the email the division sent to impacted families, the division’s transportation team won’t begin processing requests for bus transportation that came in after Aug. 1 until Wednesday, the first day of classes. The email warns it could take up to 10 days to add students to the bus rosters.
That email further irked some parents, who read it as the division shifting the blame to the families for what they say was the division’s failure to communicate.
“Parents can’t drop the ball if you never gave us a ball to begin with,” said Davis Murphy, whose son is moving from Woodbrook to Journey this year and is not yet on a bus roster.
