Durham Schools Moving Forward with Responsibility Zones, Express Stops

The school bus rotational coverage plan is running out of gas for members of the Durham Public Schools Board of Education.

On Thursday, the board gave DPS transportation officials the go-ahead to implement family responsibility zones and express stop school bus service for the School for Creative Studies, Rogers-Herr Middle School, and Durham School of the Arts.

If the board hadn’t approved both, transportation leaders said, it wouldn’t have made routes efficient enough to cease the rotational coverage plan that’s currently due to end on Jan. 17.

“I don’t think any of us want rotational coverage to continue,” said Chair Millicent Rogers.

Board member Joy Harrell Goff agreed, calling it “a very fragile Band-Aid on the situation.”

The rotational coverage, which went into effect on Dec. 2, requires families throughout the district who receive transportation aboard school buses to manage their own transportation at least once a week. Although the transportation department reported it had covered 100% of its routes through this approach, those routes aren’t always completing in a timely fashion. And some parents, lacking vehicles and access to other methods of getting their child to school, end up keeping their child at home. That leads to attendance issues and learning loss.

In short: it’s not sustainable in the long run.

Family responsibility zones, which could go into effect on Jan. 22, call for families at some DPS elementary schools to find other ways besides the big yellow bus for children to get back and forth from home and school. That could be walking, riding bicycles, taking a ride in the family car, or carpooling with neighbors. At Hope Valley Elementary School, as an example, this would affect families living within about a half mile of the school (negotiated down by school leaders from the district’s 1.5 mile policy distance).

The express service would establish transportation hubs for families to drop off and pick up students attending those secondary magnet schools. It’s not clear yet how quickly that service would kick into gear, but transportation officials are expect to bring an update to the board at its Jan. 9 work session.