So far, the 2024-2025 school year has recorded an average of 362 school bus delays and breakdowns per day.
Photo by Mathias V. via Flickr.
MAY 20, 2025
When it’s 7:30 a.m. and the school bus still hasn’t shown up, Nicole Rodriguez starts to run through a list of options in her head. She could take her three sons from her home in Glendale, Queens to their Brooklyn Heights private school by train, but that can take up to an hour and a half, meaning she’d be late for work. She could call them an Uber, but that can cost around $80. (Technically, the city is required to cover rideshare costs when a school bus doesn’t show up, but families report waiting years for reimbursements.)
So, when the bus is late—and the bus is often late, Rodriguez said—she usually opts to wait.
“If you full well know that the kids are supposed to be there at 8:30 a.m., then come earlier,” Rodriguez, who works as a transplant financial coordinator at New York University Langone, said. “Honestly, I get upset because it's taking away time from my kids.”
The Rodriguez family is one of many in New York City that relies on school buses that are chronically late. The majority of the affected students are children in special education programs who are guaranteed bus service by the city, sometimes door-to-door. Per city guidelines, a student in a special education program should not spend more than 90 minutes traveling to school. Data from the city’s Department of Education shows that frequently, the school bus delays themselves last that long.
“If there is a family who is waking up every single day 100% sure that their bus is coming, that their bus is coming on time, that their bus is coming fully staffed and their bus will get their child to school on time, I have not heard about that parent,” said Molly Senack, the education and employment community organizer at the Center for Independence of the Disabled, New York.
Families have been sounding the alarm on the city’s school bus system for years. The crisis peaked during the 2018-2019 school year, when the number of recorded delays and breakdowns was just short of 100,000, per Department of Education data. The 2022-2023 school year was another peak, with the total number of delays nearing 90,000.
So far, the 2024-2025 school year has recorded an average number of 362 delays per day. The figure is slightly lower than the last two school years, but is still indicative of a crisis within the city’s school bus system.
The lion’s share of delays so far this school year took place on special education runs, mostly in the mornings. The majority of delays were due to “heavy traffic.” Many of them—almost 20,000—lasted between an hour and 90 minutes.
Chronic school bus delays and no-shows can cause students to miss school and fall behind.
“Not every family has the ability to drop everything and take an individual child to school, so some kids are out of school for extended periods of time when busing isn’t in place,” said Maggie Moroff, a senior special education policy coordinator at Advocates for Children of New York.
Long delays, especially in the morning, can derail any student’s educational attainment, even if they eventually make it to class. That is especially true for students with disabilities, for whom consistency and routine can make or break a school day.
“Missed school is huge, but so is late school,” Moroff said. “When schools schedule the calendar, they don't say, ‘Well, you know, Maggie is gonna be late for school every day, so let's not give her an important subject first period.’ So if I am late to school every day, I'm missing a lot of work.”
Parents and advocates point to a number of reasons for New York City’s school bus failure. The city has a shortage of bus drivers, which contributes to delays and lengthened routes. Bus routing is messy and inefficient, parents say, often changing halfway through the school year and occasionally resulting in children traveling on school buses for over 2 hours. Parents also describe persistent communication issues, and report having to jump through hoops to find out when their bus is coming or report a delay to the Office of Pupil Transportation.
The Department of Education’s Office of Pupil Transportation declined to comment for this story.
As Sara Catalinotto sees it, the root of the bussing crisis is a 45-year-old contract between the Department of Education and a number of bus companies. Catalinotto is the founder of Parents to Improve School Transportation, but she prefers to call it by its acronym and homophone: PIST. The organization wants the city to reach a new deal, which would allow for more companies to bid for contracts. The current contract expires at the end of June.
If the contracts were more competitive, companies would be incentivized to improve their services, Catalinotto said. She also thinks conditions for bus drivers would improve, making the job more attractive.
“We've always noted that there's a connection between how the workforce is being treated and how the students are being treated,” Catalinotto said.
Before they went to private school in Brooklyn Heights, Rodriguez’s three sons were enrolled in public school in Queens. Her youngest was having an especially difficult time keeping up. Due to his diagnosis of dyslexia and dysgraphia, a learning disability that affects a person’s ability to write, the 8-year-old had trouble keeping up in public school.
So, Rodriguez filed a due process complaint against New York City’s Department of Education and obtained a full reimbursement to send her son to the Brooklyn Heights school, which specializes in educating children with dyslexia and other language-based learning disorders.
Over the last year, her son has gone from reading at a kindergarten level to a second grade one. Rodriguez attributes the jump to all the specialty tutoring and individualized attention he receives at his new school.
Now, Rodriguez has been able to place all three of her sons—who all have dyslexia and dysgraphia—at the private school, with financial support from the Department of Education.
“It has been a life changing experience,” Rodriguez said of her sons’ school change. “The fact that bus delays are taking away time from my kids actually learning, it's frustrating.”