LYNN — Superintendent Dr. Patrick Tutwiler announced tentative plans to resume transportation for students on a staggered schedule at Thursday’s School Committee meeting.
Transportation for all students was temporarily suspended at the end of March, a decision Tutwiler said was due to a statewide shortage of bus drivers.
He plans to outline the specifics of the district’s new transportation plan during a virtual town hall meeting, which is scheduled for next Tuesday, April 13.
“In an effort to meet every student’s transportation needs, we have explored numerous alternatives and evaluated multiple options, all of which have not yielded a substantive, comprehensive, reliable and safe means for transporting students,” Tutwiler said.
Transportation has been suspended because there are only 18 bus drivers, who would be responsible for providing transit for about 600 students, Tutwiler said.
“This number of drivers is enough to provide transportation for approximately 60 percent of students who have it on their individual education plan,” he said. “Because we cannot provide transportation for all, we temporarily suspended it.”
Tutwiler said outreach to families regarding the new transportation plan is underway, but the projected start date of that plan would not be until at least May 12.
“Root development is a major undertaking and typically takes about two months to develop,” he said. “In close partnership with our transportation provider, we plan to launch our plan on or before May 12.”
As of Wednesday, Tutwiler said about 70 percent of special education students have returned to in-person learning, with their families bringing them to school. Families who are driving their students, who would usually receive transportation, are eligible for a mileage reimbursement at 57 cents per mile.
According to Tutwiler, district administration has been working to devise a plan since the late winter months when the problem was brought to their attention.
“We can only operate on the information we have,” he said. “When the information we have is there is a shortage but it will be satisfied by a given date, we plan according to that. But then when it was made clear to us that it is not materializing in the way that we first conveyed, we had to go back to the drawing board and figure out how to help them find drivers.”
The Lynn Public Schools posted flyers on its website and Facebook page to try to help its partner transportation company, North Reading Transportation (NRT), recruit drivers, but Tutwiler said that tactic did not yield positive results.
“Never, at any point during this year, was anybody on this team leaning back in their chair sort of waiting for a solution to drop in our lap,” he said. “Our hearts are broken … as we know there is a subset of families who cannot get their students to school and we are working every angle to get that to happen as quickly as possible.”
Tutwiler said that while there is still transportation for students who are in out-of-district programs and the Together Educating and Advancing Multi-Handicapped Students (TEAMS) program, all other transportation within the district had to be halted because of equity issues.
“If you can’t provide it across all of the students who have a legal right to it through their education plan, then it makes more sense to suspend it,” he said.
School Committee member Michael Satterwhite echoed that point, saying “equity’s important, especially for our special education students.”
The process of finalizing a new plan takes time, said Tutwiler, but the district is in the process of developing one right now.
“Our real focus has been solution-oriented,” Tutwiler said, adding that the district is also planning to develop a plan for how to compensate students who have lost in-person learning time because of the decision to suspend transportation.
“We owe it to them,” he said.
Allysha Dunnigan can be reached at [email protected].
