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Chicago Public Schools officials said Friday that the district has made headway in providing student transportation after a rocky autumn.
CEO Pedro Martinez told the school board that 148 students with disabilities are waiting for school bus rides, down from about 1,200 at the start of the school year. He said a complaint with the Illinois State Board of Education about the district’s failure to provide rides to students with disabilities has been closed. And the district is gearing up to start providing rides to a small number of general education students at selective enrollment or magnet schools for the first time since the 2022-23 school year.
Martinez said that on Dec. 9, the district will launch a pilot program in which some campuses serve as transportation hubs, starting with several schools in under-resourced neighborhoods. The district is choosing these centralized pickup and dropoff campuses using its Opportunity Index, a measure that factors in student demographics, neighborhood characteristics, and other metrics, the schools chief said.
Families eligible for rides from these hubs to their schools will get calls the week of Thanksgiving, he said. More school hubs will be added later this school year, as long as the setup isn’t worsening commute times and access to rides for students with disabilities.
“I pledge to you that we will not stop working on this issue,” Martinez said.
In recent years, the district has struggled to provide rides for students and its efforts to deal with the issue repeatedly came under fire, even as officials blamed a national bus driver shortage and a strike at one of its transportation contractors this fall. Last school year, after the state launched an inquiry into the district’s problems with busing students with disabilities, the district stopped providing rides to any general education students.
Advocates for students with disabilities filed their latest complaint with the state this fall, alleging that CPS is in violation of a federal law that requires districts to provide transportation services for students with disabilities. Martinez said that complaint has been resolved.
But CPS Parents for Buses, a group formed last school year in response to the transportation issues, noted in a statement that district leaders said back in the summer that they would pilot the hub model during the year’s first quarter.
“It is inexcusable that, two months after school began, some students with disabilities still lack transportation, and thousands of low-income and English language learners still don’t have a safe way to get to schools,” the group said.
CPS officials said they receive new transportation requests daily, and some of the students awaiting rides requested them in recent weeks.
“Our top priority remains getting our students with disabilities on bus routes within 10 days of their requests,” Martinez said.
Charles Mayfield, the district’s chief operating officer, said the district has added new transportation vendors and has 835 drivers this fall compared to about 720 two years ago. In response to a question from board member Debbie Pope, he said the district estimates it would need about 1,300 drivers to offer rides to all students whose families request them.
Mila Koumpilova is Chalkbeat Chicago’s senior reporter covering Chicago Public Schools. Contact Mila at mkoumpilova@chalkbeat.org.