A post that actually is about WPS Transportation

 I did promise you an actual WPS Transportation post; here it is! Note that a transportation update is part of this week's Finance and Operations Subcommittee meeting on Thursday at 5 pm. You can join us in person in room 410 of 20 Irving Street, or the Zoom link is at the top of the agenda, plus the meeting will be streamed online as usual.

If I can just reflect for a moment...

What a thing to go from this in the FY17 budget:

Text reads: Student Transportation: The Administration will explore the feasibility of directly providing all in-district student transportation services beginning in 2020. The analysis and recommendation will be forwarded to the School Committee in advance of the next student transportation contract period. Further, the current capital equipment budget funding level is insufficient to provide a reliable replacement cycle for special education buses. With 35 buses and 1-3 vehicle replacement funding per year, the Administration will need to explore the lease of vehicles through the operating budget in the near future.

...to this for the first day of the 2022-23 school year:

I can't think of anything I've been part of that's gone from vision to execution in quite this fashion. So when I tell you that I choked up a bit when I saw this on my phone Monday morning, I'm not exaggerating:

As I said at our meeting on Thursday, one thing that has mattered enormously in this undertaking has been the degree to which it has been embraced by the community. From the vote just over a year ago (how was it only that long??) by the Worcester School Committee over the objections of then-superintendent Binienda, the degree to which the community has been solidly on the side of making this work has been abundantly clear. This past week, the overwhelming number of messages I got from parents (and there were a lot!) had some mention of how much they appreciated the district was doing transportation in-house, even if they were contacting me with a concern or a need for information. This was Worcester's project, which Worcester embraced, and Worcester is making it work.

It's far far too early for "Mission Accomplished" banners, but I don't think it's too early to note the vision that got us here was Brian Allen's--those are his words above in the FY17 budget--who has continued to ask how we can run our systems more effectively and more efficiently.
"Cycle of continuous improvement," anyone?

And, speaking as a school committee member, I'd sure as heck rather be paying our local bus drivers $30 an hour than sending any of our limited public dollars off to the international shareholders of National Express.

ON TO ACTUAL INFORMATION (much of this drawn from this week's update from Superintendent Monárrez):

• We started the week with 74 full-sized buses for the 74 routes those run, but we had several buses in and out of service for the first few days. That's clearly going to be less of an issue as more of the new buses--of which another 10 will be ready for this coming Wednesday--come into service and fewer of the buses we're renting are what we're using. That also will increase the number of buses we have overall, which will take some of the pressure off each bus.
  
  
• We have more drivers being trained, tested, and starting all of the time. (I think we even had someone pass a test Thursday?) Remember, we're training in-house, too, so new drivers are learning all of the time. It's going to be a bit before we get up to full (budgeted) strength on the number of drivers, but we're getting there. 
  
  
• For those who are asking when things, particularly in the afternoon, will be more dependably on time, the answer is twofold: the first few weeks are always creaky (they always have been), PLUS as we cycle more drivers in and can both decouple routes and have spares, there will be much smoother afternoons. So you'll see improvement over the next few weeks, with further improvements over the next few months with more drivers and buses on.
  
  
• Enter this number in your cell: 508-799-3241. That's WPS Transportation. They start answering the phones about when the buses leave the lot, and they're there until buses get back. 
  Crucial point about the phones: the wait time quoted is inaccurate. I know a number of people calling early in the week (include School Committee vice-chair Jermaine Johnson!) who had a quoted wait time of an hour; that was never actually the case! They're working to disable this message when you're on hold, but in the meantime, please don't believe it.
  Also, please note that liaisons speak Spanish and Portuguese in addition to English, so share that!
  
  
• On the app: The app available for students and families is called VersaTrans MyStop, made by Tyler Technologies. You can find district directions here. As a student or family member, you need only student ID and birthday to sign in; it syncs with our student information system to pull up and give access to the bus to which your student is assigned (and no others). 
  A few things to remember: you'll only see the outline of the route once the bus has started out, and you'll only see the bus on your student's route. However, we do have a few buses that are running double routes in the afternoons (they pick up at the high school, drop a busful at the stops closest to school that clear the bus, and go back to school for a longer, second route), and that it IS a double route isn't clear on the app. The schools do know this, and it should be clear to your student. The GPS also can't tell if what the bus is running is a consolidated route (in other words, the bus is picking up students from more than one route); this has happened when families might not see their bus running, and then a bus appears. Both of these will be resolved as more buses and drivers come online, and we can stop having to do this.
  If you are still having issues with your app, please call Transportation during the day and have them walk you through a reset. At this point, with the exceptions of the above, the app is operational, so if you're having issues, it's your connection with the app that needs to be fixed.
  
  
• If you are interested in how this is going and where this is going, please do read the backup for this week's meeting (that links straight to the page) for more information of where we are now, where we're going this year, and what happens next. And again, that meeting is at 5 on Thursday, and the public is welcome (online or in person).
  
  
• And if you have questions, please continue to send them along. The changes and improvements on this have been more than daily, and I know the feedback, questions, issues, and so forth getting back to those running the system have made a difference. Keep 'em coming. 

This post from Robert Reich this Labor Day reminded me of the spirit that's clear every time I walk into the Transportation Department. We'd gotten a few questions over if there'd be a division, for example, between those who have driven directly for the district right along, and those who were working for contractors. Through goodwill on all sides, a self-identification among staff as "Worcester Public School" bus drivers and monitors (that's what the buses all said, after all!), and management that genuinely values people, there has been an ongoing sense of (as with the larger community) this being a group effort to make this the best dang public school bus system around. 

Finally (and with the caveat that lists are dangerous things and always leave people out!), what a difference leadership makes: having Dr. Monárrez walk through the things that were not working (not denying they were there), while discussing what concrete steps were being taken to improve a system that people were working very hard to improve is what makes a system actually get better over time. I appreciate her thoughtful consideration of what is working and what isn't, her honesty about it, and then her leading concrete planning to improve systems.

I do want to note that having a transportation system directed by John Hennessey, who can 'make sense' of transportation in a way that's a combination of innate skill and experience that can't be matched, has been part of my level of confidence that this all can fly.
I also want to note the enormous amount of work done by assistant director of transportation Mike Freeman this week (and before and probably after!); I know I personally talked to him one morning before 6 am, and I got an email from him one night at 9 pm, and I know I wasn't alone. Mike is ongoingly devoted to making this all work better, and we couldn't be in a better position there.
The supervisors who are overseeing all that's going in and out--Wayne Cardwell, Angel Carrasquillo and Benjamin River--remind me of those movie sailors at the wheel, steadily steering a ship through a hurricane (sorry, gentlemen; I may just have condemned you to having that metaphor follow you!).
Yelitza Garcia is HR over at Transportation; one of my favorite tidbits from the FY23 budget is that Transportation staffing has increased 174.4%. That's Yelitza!
If you connected with someone at Transportation this week specifically about MyStop, that was Cassie Shea in IT, and thank goodness for her! 
We have had routers working for us for years at this point--did you know we have ongoing changes over the course of the year?--and Kerri Collins and Joy Winnie have been stalwarts through all the changes these past years.
If you are among those who have ever said "I could never do that" about driving a school bus: imagine teaching others to drive a school bus? We could not be making this work without the trainers and safety people--Marianne Bryan, Kathy Everett, Jason Crue, Dawn Cavanaugh, and Peggy Holloway (some of whom were driving buses themselves this week!), and I know they've also been key to that cohesiveness among the drivers and monitors, too. 

Anyone who answers phones to respond to questions and does it well consistently (said this elected official) is performing an underappreciated service, and the transportation liaisons responding in particular to parents these first weeks of school are so crucial to making this all work. That's Owen Tessier, Annaliese Estabrook, Becca Carlberg, and Adriana Campbell. 

Those actually keeping the buses running--the mechanics who are Jani Nakollari, James Hicks, and John Holmes--are literally keeping it all going.

And of course, to all the drivers and to all the monitors who are actually making the transportation happen: thank you! 
Onward to week two!
If I missed anyone above, that's my error and please tell me!