Perhaps the best way to get a snapshot of the current severity of the ongoing Durham Public Schools transportation crisis is to count the number of corny jokes made by Chief Operating Officer Larry Webb at any given meeting.
“Since January 23, all of our routes have been covered,” Webb told local city and county officials at a joint meeting on February 11. “This is due to the extraordinary efforts of our full-time bus drivers, school employees, and transportation employees who are going the extra mile—literally—to fill in as needed as we try to grow our bus driver workforce.”
“[Director of auxiliary services Kenneth] Barnes and his team have really stepped on the gas and accelerated through this process—see what I did there?” Webb said at a February 6 meeting, referencing efforts to get routes covered by DPS staff who already have commercial driver’s licenses. “This is really where the rubber meets the road—see what I did there again?” he said later in the meeting, giving kudos to school-level staff for their problem solving. “The wheels on the bus are going around and around,” he told joint government sessions on both February 11 and February 18.
Webb isn’t quite taking a victory lap—see what I did there?—but his dad jokes do mark a change from the previously grim tone of the besieged district leadership. The school system’s transit crisis is certainly not over, but having all routes covered is a massive improvement from the beginning of the school year, when students were left waiting hours for buses that never arrived.
With 135 drivers (which does not include drivers who have other primary roles in the district and only serve as substitute drivers), the district is still below its target minimum of 155 drivers. In response to questions from the county commissioners, Webb said that a staff of 200 drivers would allow DPS to cover current routes (with drivers who are dedicated to driving only), have a pool of substitute drivers, and possibly even expand service while eliminating the need for drivers to cover multiple routes in a day.
This new era of reliable daily service comes as a result of having more drivers, but also of decreasing the total number of students transported by the district compared to the beginning of the year. Since the end of rotational coverage, though, the district has steadily added students to routes.
Administrators, seemingly wanting to avoid making promises they can’t keep, have not made clear exactly what service will look like in a future with more drivers.
That’s left parents with questions about express stops, which the board approved in December but administrators put on hold in January. Express stops (which would require families to transport their children to a nearby DPS school that they do not attend where the students would then catch a bus to their magnet school), may still go into effect for some magnet schools next year, though the district has not given a substantial update on that plan since its initial rollout was paused.
“I am once again asking you for the information that family should have had weeks ago,” parent Chad Haefele said via written public comment last week. “Where will express stops be? What times will they operate? What are the expectations of parents at pick up and drop off?… If you can’t answer these questions by now, you shouldn’t be using this model.”
Webb told INDY via DPS spokesperson Crystal Roberts that it is “too early to predict, so express stops remain an option for consideration for school year 2025-2026.”
The future is also uncertain for those in “family responsibility zones,” areas close to 21 elementary schools in which students do not receive district transportation.
The January rollout of FRZs was not entirely smooth—nearly every conversation about FRZs has included Hope Valley Elementary, where administrators suspended the plan after parents raised concerns about ongoing construction that makes the school, at the corner of roads with three and four lanes of traffic, unsafe to walk to.
Webb said that the district has hired 15 new drivers since January 6 and still has several currently going through training. Superintendent Anthony Lewis has shouted out organizations like the DPS Foundation, which have stepped in to help with the roughly $400 that it costs to even become a DPS driver (that cost includes getting a physical exam, getting the CDL, and taking other tests and certifications).
Webb has also repeatedly said that “retention is the new recruitment,” meaning it doesn’t matter how many new drivers the district hires if it can’t keep those who it already has.
In December, DAE union member and 38-year DPS veteran bus driver Retha Daniel-Ruth told the school board that, without access to staff bathrooms in schools, “some of us are out there dancing around hoping we don’t wet our clothes.”
Since then, bus drivers have been allowed to use the bathrooms in schools and the administration has also moved to set up break rooms at at least two high schools where drivers in between routes may have some “creature comforts,” said Webb.
Winston Churchill probably wasn’t thinking about the DPS transit crisis when he said to “never let a crisis go to waste.” Families and local electeds, though, have been trying to harness that crisis energy to create lasting change.
City council member Javiera Caballero pointed out that by getting a DPS student to use the public bus, rather than school transportation, the city was creating a future transit user.
“There are so many people who don’t want to get on our buses just because they’ve never done it before. If you get [them] on a bus at 12 or 13, you build a user into the system.”
Kristen Brookshire, lead school planner, highlighted the city’s ongoing vision zero and city-county bicycle and pedestrian plans as opportunities to “revisit the way that projects near schools are prioritized and consider whether these projects should be held to a higher design standard,” including wider sidewalks and increased traffic-calming infrastructure.
“If we design for kids, we design for everybody,” Brookshire said.
Jacopo Montobbio, Bike Durham’s education program manager who has been hustling to provide street safety education and reflective vests to students, previously told INDY that he hopes “the next time there’s a crisis, perhaps the streets will be ready and the infrastructure will be in place to make it easier for the next generation of kids to be able to safely walk and bike to school.”
A previous version of this story listed an incorrect date for Webb’s statement that all routes have been covered since January 23.
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Reach Reporter Chase Pellegrini de Paur at [email protected]. Comment on this story at [email protected].