[Letter to the Editor] Fed Up with DPS Transportation Fog

Readers of Southpoint Access are encouraged to share their viewpoints in letters to the editor. Use this link to submit your thoughts!

As I write this, I have no idea where in the city of Durham my 11-year-old son is at 5:45 p.m. on a Wednesday. And it’s not the first time. It’s not the first time this week. Why? Because he takes a Durham Public Schools bus, of course.

Last school year, when DPS was on the brink of collapse due to payroll errors and promises that leadership couldn’t deliver on, I counted myself lucky that school was a five-minute drive away, and at least I didn’t have to deal with the totally unreliable bus service. But this year, my newly minted middle schooler is on the bus each way to get to his new school miles away—and I’ve joined the ranks of rightfully pissed-off parents who are done being polite and understanding.

For those not in the know, like I was last year: DPS uses an app called Edulog, which is supposed to show where your child’s bus is and when it is set to arrive. This means if you have a small child and can’t afford another cell phone (or some other tracking technology, which you shouldn’t have to buy anyway), you have a way of knowing where your child is, which is Durham Public Schools’ obligation to disclose as long as a child is in its care. This is important for a few reasons, namely safety and equal access to education. I’ll get into that in a minute, but first, the dirt:

DPS entered a contract with Edulog in January 2023, but Edulog doesn’t work, and nobody has done anything about it since. If a bus needs repair or a driver doesn’t show up—which seems to happen multiple times a week—it is swapped out for a working bus. Sometimes the buses are swapped several times in a day, and the child doesn’t even know what number bus to get on, increasing the risk they end up in the wrong place. The bigger problem is that because the GPS is never switched over to the new bus, many of us parents find ourselves looking at a motionless GPS dot in a repair lot, with no idea where our children are as the evening creeps in.

Why does this matter? A few reasons, starting with safety. Many of these children are not old enough to know what to do if they are dropped off somewhere a mile from home, as one five-year-old child was, according to a fellow parent on the SoDu Parents Facebook page. Children can be left unnoticed in the back of the bus, riding all the way to the drop-off depot until they are discovered (and then left to fend for themselves), as was another case shared on the same Facebook page. In each of these stories, the children got lucky: they saw someone who looked nice, and they asked for help. But luck runs out. We know this from the Amber Alerts that go out almost weekly these days. Are the chances of a kid being abducted high? Probably not. But raise your hand if you’re willing to take that gamble with your child, every day, for the next several years.

It’s 6 p.m., and once again, I—like many DPS parents—have called the transportation office for answers, but nobody picks up. Other parents have been hung up on repeatedly when someone does answer. Nobody returns voicemails. Nobody acknowledges emails. I’ve had better luck reaching the IRS. In a couple of months, it will be dark out by 4:30. I call another parent, and their child came home an hour ago. Where is my small 75-pound kid? Nobody can tell me. And I ask my husband: at what hour do we choose to call the cops?

This isn’t a hard thing to fix. Edulog is also supposed to push out notifications in case of delay, but this doesn’t happen reliably, and many times the message is pushed hours after the fact. If I don’t get a notification that my child’s bus will be two hours late coming home, I assume he is on the bus. I can see his smartwatch has died, so “thank goodness for Edulog.” When he never comes home, and I stand on a boulevard corner for an hour and a half for the umpteenth time, I get to thinking: Why is Durham Public Schools letting this continue? I bet my son is thinking the same thing as he waits outside school for an hour and a half after everyone else has gone. I bet all the parents with dinner on the table who can’t afford that extra cell phone or AirTag are thinking about it, too.

And the lost learning is real. When the morning bus is two hours late and there’s no communication or visibility into where it is, my son misses math and English—those core subjects the state tests them on three times a year (and by which teacher effectiveness is measured). And when he comes home at 6 p.m. instead of 4:15, he loses homework time. Nothing is perfect, I tell myself. We must settle for less.

The truth is that these apps aren’t properly vetted, either because of a lack of due diligence on the part of DPS or because someone has a friend in high places who likes to make campaign donations. Often, school districts must go with the lowest bidder when contracting third-party solutions. But a quick Google search should have put any administrator off choosing Edulog. In 2020, Tallahassee won a settlement against Edulog after the app’s failure led to a total meltdown of student transportation. Add to that list Leon County and St. Tammany Parish. Most recently, Edulog’s API flaws led to a massive leak of student data, prompting Montgomery School District to cancel its pilot of the app. (Yet districts keep feeding tax money to Edulog—most recently, Chicago Public Schools gave the company $4M.) If I was this bad at my job, I’d be fired.

More will fall on us, even those without kids in the system. When DPS makes poor choices about where our tax money goes, you know the deal: higher property taxes so there’s more money to allocate the wrong way. What’s cheaper upfront often becomes an expensive mistake to fix later. But without any answers, it’s safe to suppose that DPS is kicking the can down the road. That empty, empty road with no buses on it.

I’m not all Karen (look at me gaslighting myself like DPS wants me to!). I understand that running a school district is hard and comes with a list of overwhelming challenges, from lack of funding to meeting federal requirements for diverse students’ needs. DPS has some amazing staff (with the exception of the top brass who make these kinds of fateful decisions) who are overworked, unappreciated, and underpaid. If I can gather the empathy to understand that as a parent and practice patience as my child goes missing on a regular basis, I’d appreciate DPS returning the favor. And maybe even doing something about it.

DPS parents have been beyond understanding in the face of huge challenges over the last year alone. We are going into a few years now of being oh-so-understanding. But when does being empathetic and patient about challenges simply prolong inaction? How long must we put our understanding for unresponsive, unaccountable leadership ahead of our children’s safety and education? At what point have we sunk into complacency? As I regale my co-workers in other states with the woes of Durham Public Schools, I see jaws hit the floor and realize: perhaps we’ve already gotten there.

Jane Dornemann
Woodcroft