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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]My kids also go to one of those "Elementary and Middle schools are adjacent" places.

Neither of them are bus riders, so we personally havent been affected by this debacle, but I know a lot of people that have.

I would love to see how the procurement went down to award the contract to Zum on the supposed promise of "electric buses".  Something really stinks there. [/quote]

I'm with you. I just feel there is more to the story than we know right now.

Of course, the more we learn about the bus situation this year, the worse it looks. Here is an article from the Baltimore Banner from today:

[url]https://www.thebaltimorebanner.com/education/k-12-schools/howard-county-school-bus-zum-7MJFQPVPUNFYTFSL24W7ZX77KE/[/url]

[b]The district definitely contributed to the problems at the start of the year by making late changes to the routes. [/b]

But again, I want to know more about how the procurement was drafted. The article suggests, without really explaining, that the district "created a new process" for the procurement" but doesn't explain that point. [/quote]

Ya think?

It is amazing how many errors were made in the implementation of changing school start times and busing.

For the start times, trying to move adjacent schools to have start times less than 30 minutes (sometimes at the same time) without providing additional support or buses.  Trying to have double the number of students in buses and cars arriving in the same 15 minute window was incredibly stupid.  The schools did not have practice drills on how to manage the increased traffic due to overlapping start times.

Engaging a new bus vendor and not enforcing actual tests of the buses with practice drives.  On the first day, school was delayed over an hour because the vendor did not practice getting buses out of the lot and it took 45 minutes for all buses to clear the lot.  It took until the 3rd day before they implemented a staggered departure time for the drivers.  On the first day, some of the out-of-town drivers had never test-driven their routes and some got lost or drove the wrong way because they did not know the route.  On the first day, many drivers were late because the bus company did not actually test how long each route would take and assigned approximate route times to the drivers (who did not know their routes).  Many of the route times were not calculated taking into account traffic signals and actual morning rush hour traffic.  So, many of the drivers route times were completely incorrect.  In some cases, because drivers did not know their routes, they missed children and many children's parents had to drive them to school because buses never showed up.  It took almost the entire first week before all children who were bus riders were actually picked up by their assigned bus to get to school.  The schools did not have enough buses to run the routes.  After the school year started, the school district had to rent additional buses from local bus companies because the out-of-state bus company did not provide enough buses despite assuring the school district THE WEEK BEFORE SCHOOL STARTED, that they had enough buses.

And this is just the functional part of delivering service.  It doesn't even deal with the promises and contractually documented contract features that were supposed to justify the additional costs, like having green buses, having a bus-tracking app that parents could us to track the status and time of the buses their kids were supposed to ride.

Martinaro failed with both initiatives this year, changing school times and changing bus vendors.  The failures cost the school district a lot of money and created a lot of havok that the schools are still trying to fix (1.5 quarters into the school year).  He is retiring before the school district can fire him.[/quote]

In fairness, didn't the school board change the start times based on the recommendations from the outside consultant?

Also, the bolded portion of the post above related to the information provided in the Baltimore Banner article, based on new information, stating that on top of all the problems that Zum had, HCPSS contributed to the disastrous opening by changing routes at the last minute, which meant that there couldn't be practice runs.

[quote]Two days before Zum’s roughly 200 brand-new buses would file out of their Jessup bus yard and pick up thousands of Howard County students for the first time, the transportation company was caught off guard — school system leaders had changed some of the bus routes, and some of them contained errors.

Some routes that previously called for buses now needed vans. Some of the routes listed zero kids for pickup. And their new drivers, many unfamiliar with the area, wouldn’t have a chance to do a test run of the revised routes.

“What a disaster,” wrote one Zum executive in an email that Saturday morning.[/quote][/quote]

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