After thousands of Howard County students were stranded without bus service last August, people wanted answers. Now, a year later, there are some.
An independent audit released this week blames the debacle on unfilled school system jobs, a lack of deadlines and overconfidence of — and in — the system’s new bus contractor, Zūm.
The San Francisco-based company signed a three-year, $27 million contract with the school system to operate nearly half its bus routes. It is currently in the second year of the contract.
“We strongly disagree with the statements in the report,” Zūm officials said in a statement, noting that the company worked with school officials to analyze and correct last year’s challenges.
In a statement following the afternoon session of Thursday’s school board meeting, Howard Superintendent Bill Barnes said the school system, “acknowledges the role our internal issues played in the challenges from a year ago.”
He also provided an update to the current school year’s transportation services: “The last time our student transportation services operated this effectively was prior to the COVID pandemic,” Barnes said.
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The audit by Prismatic Services Inc. notes that no laws or district policies were broken, and that the school system has already addressed many of the underlying transportation problems. But it offers a deeper look at exactly what went wrong.
Here are some interesting tidbits of the 119-page audit.
The ‘unfilled jobs’ weren’t just bus drivers
A regional shortage of bus drivers led Zūm to fly in 70-some bus drivers from the West Coast, and that still wasn’t enough to cover its routes. But those weren’t the only workers in short supply.
Several new positions in Howard County schools’ transportation office hadn’t been filled when school started last fall. Those jobs were the ones responsible for creating bus routes that could accommodate later high school start times.
Without those professionals, there was “a greater burden on existing staff,” the report states.
“Multiple staff members noted that the HCPSS hiring process is typically slow, so it does not appear to have been a lack of funding for the new positions or a failure to create the positions,” the report states.
The school system was also out of practice onboarding a new bus contractor, the report concluded. Zūm is the only new contractor added in the past decade, according to the school system.
Zūm had never served a large school system
While Zūm repeatedly assured school system staff that the first day of school preparations were going well, school system documents and interviews conducted by the audit company tell a different story.
Interviews and school system documents show that “Zūm overstated their abilities and did not bring to bear a great depth of experience in rolling out new service at large scale,” the report said.
A school system employee said in the audit, “Zūm clearly could not do the things they said they could do on Day One.” Multiple school system staff members were also reported saying the same two phrases about Zūm: “Overpromised and underdelivered.”
No one from the school system or Zūm is named in the audit.
The audit findings show “little evidence” that Zūm officials asked the kinds of questions they should have.
The audit states Zūm leaders, who are based in San Francisco, could have made multiple visits to the county to observe daily bus drop-offs and pickups, and could have created an extensive checklist from its observations.
“As a contractor with experience in other school districts, it is not apparent why Zūm failed to practice operations sufficiently,” the audit states.
In a statement, Zūm officials said their work to fix last year’s problems has resulted in “100% route coverage, an average of 97% on-time performance, and a consistent 4.9 out of 5 rating from HCPSS families in our parent app” this school year.
“We continue to work closely with the HCPSS transportation team to deliver on Superintendent Barnes’ priorities for the 2024-2025 school year,” the statement said.
In his statement Barnes said, “I have had very productive and positive conversations with Zūm leadership, and I commend the efforts of their staff and drivers to improve and play a significant role in the success in this year’s student transportation efforts.”
Bus contracts were delayed by a lawsuit
The school board voted in June 2022 to cancel all of the district’s existing bus contracts, effective in June 2023, in an attempt to change the way contracts are issued, according to the audit. In Maryland, each bus has a contract attached to it, meaning if one bus company receives 100 bus routes, there are 100 individual contracts.
After legacy bus contractors — companies that had worked with the school system since at least the 2022-2023 academic year, if not earlier — filed a class action lawsuit in response to the school board’s June 2022 decision, the board rescinded its decision that December.
While the contractors withdrew the lawsuit in January 2023, it took several months to reach a settlement in mediation. That didn’t happen until early August 2023.
“Some legacy contractors lost drivers who saw no future staying with an employer without a busing contract,” the report states. Because of this, in mid-August last year, these contractors had to give up approximately 58 routes — over 10% of the total daily number of bus routes, according to the report.
Barnes acknowledged how the past treatment of legacy contractors and also stated that work has been done to “rebuild supportive relationships” with them to reestablish the partnership between the contractors and the school system.
Howard doesn’t have its own bus fleet
According to the report, Howard County is the only large school district in the state that completely outsources its yellow bus transportation. It is also only one of five districts in Maryland to not have its own bus fleet.
Howard schools have 43,619 students eligible to ride a bus to school, according to the report. Baltimore County Public Schools, on the other hand, only outsources 18% of its buses for nearly 80,000 eligible students.
The other four Maryland school districts that don’t have their own buses are Calvert, Carroll, Garrett and Worcester — all much smaller systems.
The audit noted that Howard County spends less on transportation than recommended. Over the past decade, the school system’s transportation spending has varied between 3.9% to 4.3% of its overall budget. Best practices, according to the report, say that transportation spending should reflect 4% to 6% over the district’s overall budget.
