Research Briefing | New York City Yellow Bus Service

The full debrief is available for download at the bottom of the article.

Introduction 🚌

As New York Appleseed’s advocacy for school integration increasingly grows to encompass integration planning for entire community school districts in New York City, the issue of transportation has become increasingly salient. Not all school districts are alike, and several that wish to implement a diversity plan also must address the question of access for students who reside in transportation deserts or need extra assistance to attend an inclusive school setting. When made available, data on yellow bus service and student transit can offer important insight into the access, or lack thereof, all students, particularly our most marginalized students, have to quality schooling due to transport options.

In seeking research on yellow bus service in NYC, we also aim to steer the conversation of transportation during integration planning away from detrimental coded language and fearmongering tactics. Unfortunately, many opponents of integration employ the term “busing” to elicit harmful narratives weaponized by white parents to prevent integration in the 1960s and 1970s. Despite opponents' best efforts to paint integration as artificial, forced, and burdensome–the reality is that many families (nearly 15% of all students) today use yellow-bus transportation to schools for a large variety of purposes - including several that contribute to school segregation.

The issues pertaining to yellow-bus service are complicated–not only due to lack of data but also due to a long and fraught history between the New York City Department of Education and its reliance on private contractors. Inevitably, the rocky relationship with contractors and their drivers, and city officials over the last decade have affected families' access to putting their children on a bus to get to school each day. This briefing has been broken into six sections: Section I provides a detailed overview of the legal history of yellow-bus service to answer how the relationship between contractors, drivers, and city officials has evolved over time; section II provides an overview of controversies and developments right before the Covid-19 pandemic; section III provides an overview of what has transpired throughout the pandemic; section IV analyzes the most recent and made available data and usage of yellow bus service for NYC, section V is a brief outline of procurement and eligibility for students; and lastly section VI concludes our report with insights and recommendations we garnered due to our research

Transparency and accountability regarding student access to transportation are crucial to further a key tenet of Real Integration–resource equity. This report and its included recommendations are to place us in a beer position for discussions on the ways we can more equitably allocate this important resource.

Executive Summary 🚌

The New York City Department of Education provides yellow bus transportation for students through private bus contractors. This creates a unique and complex relationship between the department, the drivers, and the transportation vendors. Under this system, the Department of Education must work to meet the often-competing demands of the unions and vendors while satisfying the community, students, and families. There have been several disputes over the years, including two strikes by bus drivers’ unions in 1979 and 2013. The first strike originated from a dispute over the inclusion of Employee Protection Provisions in yellow bus contracts. The provisions granted, among other things, hiring priority to employees of private bus companies who lost their jobs due to a change in the contractor. After a three-month strike in 1979, the Board of Education agreed to include the provisions in contracts. A dispute arose again in 2006 when the Department of Transportation transferred certain contracts without the provisions to the Department of Education. This time, vendors commenced a legal proceeding challenging the provisions. The New York Supreme Court declared the provisions unlawful, and the Court of Appeals affirmed, stating the EPPs had anticompetitive features and invited cost-inflating effects. The Department of Education attempted to include the provisions again in 2017, and again, the courts struck the provisions down after challenges from vendors. The City faces rising costs, and, in recent years, vendors have been struggling with school buses breaking down and delays. Additionally, vendor adherence to regulations requiring certain safeguards, such as background checks for bus drivers, have sometimes gone unenforced. In response, the Chancellor of the Department of Education replaced multiple personnel at the Office of Pupil Transportation.

The COVID-19 pandemic has further complicated busing issues (and access to education in general), as New York City schools shuttered and bus service came to a screeching halt in March 2020. Certain initiatives that were underway prior to the pandemic fell by the wayside as the City grappled with the pandemic generally and looked for a path forward under pandemic conditions. As the City continues to adjust to a “new normal” in the nearly two years since the pandemic began, there have nevertheless been some noteworthy developments with respect to yellow school bus service. Such developments that warrant continued monitoring include the Department of Education’s rollout of GPS monitoring for school buses, the creation of NYC School Bus Umbrella Services, Inc.—a city-owned non-profit that is now responsible for 900 bus routes for children with disabilities previously overseen by a private bus company—and the introduction of electric school buses to New York City’s fleet. All these events either have or will impact the more than 100,000 students that rely on yellow bus transportation each day.

Download the Full Report Here