Losing a day of school bus service is weighing on Durham families. Will it end in 2025?
Durham Public Schools aims to resume busing five days a week in mid-January, and to help ensure there are enough drivers, the district is creating walk zones and express stops that will limit service for about 2,000 students at 24 schools.
It’s been three weeks since bus service was scaled back to four days a week for the estimated 20,000 bus riders districtwide, a strategy that district planning director Matthew Palmer called “a very short-term Band-Aid” to prevent last-minute cancellations that cause students to miss school.
Dozens of parents and employees said it’s been difficult to manage, speaking out at a Board of Education meeting that ran past midnight Thursday.
Tashira Smith is a service worker with two children in school, but no car to take them herself. Fridays is the day her family lost bus service in December.
“I can either pay $15 each way for an Uber or Lyft … or I can choose to leave them at home with my mother,” Smith said. “That’s cutting into Christmas gifts I had planned for my kids. I don’t think that’s fair. I don’t think I should have to make that sacrifice.”
The district needed 65 to 100 more full-time drivers to staff the over 800 routes driven each day, leaders said this fall. Since September, 12 have been hired and 37 are awaiting DMV training, Palmer reported Thursday.
Retha Daniel-Ruth, a bus driver who’s worked at DPS for three decades, said things are “really terrible.”
“I’m devastated and angry because I care about my kids,” Daniel-Ruth said. “It doesn’t matter what socioeconomic situation they’re from. They all deserve a ride every day to school. Not just the four days and then you figure it out the fifth day.”
Anna Benfield, an occupational therapist, said one student in a kindergarten class for kids with developmental needs missed school for an entire month earlier this year because of busing issues.
“Lasting damage has been done,” she said.
Changes coming in January 2025
Until the staffing shortage is fixed, district leaders are scrambling to improve routes and make cuts where they can.
“I feel like we have to do something,” said Board of Education member Joy Harrell Goff, who voted in favor of two new policies for 2025. “It’s a crisis situation.”
The changes are planned around the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday:
- Busing only four days a week is scheduled to end Friday, Jan. 17.
- Walk zones: Nearly 900 students living up to 1 mile around 21 elementary schools will no longer be picked up and dropped off by buses, likely beginning Tuesday, Jan. 21.
- Express stops: Students at three magnet schools that draw from all areas of the county must commute to a school near their house to get picked up by the bus, likely starting Tuesday, Jan. 21. That affects about 1,000 middle and high school students.
- Impacted schools are listed below.
Bettina Umstead, who voted against the changes, said she was “very worried that we’re shifting who can’t get to school.”
“There will be families who say, ‘I cannot do this,’” Umstead said.
Earlier in the evening, Cesia Matute, an elementary school parent, said she worries about her children walking to school alone in the cold, but she can’t take them, either.
“I am a single mother. I work from 7 a.m. to 5:30, so it is impossible for me to do certain things,” Matute said in Spanish, according to the board’s interpreter.
Deputy Superintendent Nicholas King said when a couple buses don’t show up, a principal is dealing with 75 or more kids missing school. The new strategies will help narrow that to a small handful of students at any given school, the administration hopes.
“When little Johnny’s mom comes and says, ‘I can’t get my kid here,’ that principal will know that down the street from little Johnny, there’s a family that drives and that they might be able to make that connection with that family that certainly we’re not able to make at the district level,” King said. “It’s going to be a different level of possibility when we’re talking about one or two families, as opposed to 80.”
The policies passed 6-1 and 4-2.
The second vote, for express stops, initially failed 3-3. Umstead, Millicent Rogers and Jessica Carda-Auten were against it, while Wendell Tabb had gone home. Carda-Auten changed her vote after being told returning service to five days a week would take longer otherwise.
Dozens of members of the Durham Association of Educators urged regular meetings with the union in 2025. DAE has been pushing for meetings allowing workers’ voices to be heard for almost a year, but district leaders have pushed back, citing concerns over North Carolina law barring public sector employees from collective bargaining.
The school board meets next at 5:30 p.m. at the district’s downtown headquarters on Thursday, Jan. 9.
Schools where Durham will have walk zones, express stops
An online comment form lists the schools where walk zones are planned:
- Burton Elementary
- C.C. Spaulding Elementary
- Club Boulevard Elementary
- Creekside Elementary
- Eastway Elementary
- E.K. Powe Elementary
- Fayetteville Street Elementary
- Forest View Elementary
- George Watts Montessori
- R.N. Harris Elementary
- Hillandale Elementary
- Holt Elementary
- Hope Valley Elementary
- Lakewood Elementary
- Morehead Montessori
- Murray-Masseburg Elementary
- Parkwood Elementary
- Pearsontown Elementary
- Sandy Ridge Elementary
- Southwest Elemntary
- Y.E. Smith Elementary
Three magnet schools will soon require pickup and dropoff at unsupervised express stops, typically at the school nearest a family’s house:
- Durham School of the Arts
- Rogers-Herr Middle School
- The School for Creative Studies
This story was originally published December 20, 2024 at 12:19 PM.
