The text message arrived at 8:53 p.m. on Sunday evening, long after many Stafford County parents had put their children to bed.
“Stafford Schools apologizes your child has no bus assignment,” it read. “Please consider other transportation until your child is routed. See email.”
So, instead of boarding buses for kindergarten, sixth grade, or ninth grade en route to the county’s transition day, students were dropped off in the car rider lanes at their new schools — if they were lucky enough to find a ride.
“We had about 3,000 kids not routed this morning,” said Sandra Osborn, chief communications officer for Stafford County Public Schools.
Over the summer, parents received emails from the transportation office instructing them to download and check bus routes through the MyRide K-12 app. Stephanie Belman said she had been checking the app repeatedly to see if her sixth grader would have to catch the bus on a busy highway.
“In the mornings it isn’t a problem because I would go with her, but in the afternoon she would have to come home by herself and I just was not comfortable with that,” she said.
Belman emailed and called the transportation office to find an alternative bus stop.
“I sent in that information, but the app still did not show me a bus for her to come home on,” she said. “A friend of mine in the subdivision knew what time her kids were being picked up and dropped off, but mine did not say when or how she was going to get home.”
By Sunday night, Belman received the text message stating her child did not have a bus route at all.
Jeremy Vaughn, the parent of a sixth grader, acknowledged that coordinating transportation for all students is “a daunting task.” However, he expressed frustration on social media that the school system didn’t provide “adequate and timely information for parents to handle this last-minute challenge.”
“Even if we have the flexibility to do so, those of us with a student needing this information today are all at new schools and were not given car rider information to know how to do this,” Vaughn wrote. “I was lucky to have a morning schedule and sent my child to school, but we have no plan yet for how they will get home at the end of the day and I’ve heard nothing from my school on what I should do or what their procedure is for car rider pick up.”
Pamela Mace-Murray’s 10th grader returns to the International Baccalaureate (IB) program at Brooke Point High School tomorrow. As of Monday morning, she did not know if a bus would be available to take him. At first, she thought it was just a problem for those living in south Stafford who travel long distances to specialty centers or programs. Then, a coworker informed her she would be late to work because she had to drive her child to school.
“I thought it was pretty significant and it is going to affect us,” said Mace-Murray, who runs a home health agency. “We’re a small office. It’s hard to shut down the phones so parents can head out every day to pick up their children.”
Mace-Murray said her husband plans to drive their son to school every day so she can be at the office.
“I mean, I get it. We’re in health care. We’ve been directly affected by staffing and COVID and everything,” she said. “But this feels like there’s something else going on here.”
Osborn said that the transportation office expects to have the problem resolved by Monday evening. She attributed the routing issues to the large influx of students this year and the implementation of new software.
“We’re still working out the bugs,” she said.
For parents, it’s a glitch that blindsided them.
“I don’t think it’s very fair to surprise parents like this, especially when it affects their livelihood,” Mace-Murray said.
Added Vaughn: “Challenges will happen, but this oversight seems avoidable.”
