Wrong Kid, Wrong Bus, No Show

School bus routes have been assigned, dry runs are happening. Now, we all cross our fingers and hope for the best. Will that disruptive kid be on the bus this year, the one who's teaching my child the intricacies of Instagram? Or worse — YouTube?

Before any of what follows, if you haven't already, make sure you've covered the basics — see our full breakdown of what to check before routes drop.

When things go wrong, they really go wrong. With the help of Sara Catalinotto, who runs Parents to Improve School Transportation (PIST), Ruth DiRoma, who runs busing workshops through Include NYC, and Matt Berlin, who runs the nonprofit bus company NYCSBUS and was head of OPT in the Bloomberg Administration, we've outlined the bad — but also the good.

A less-verbal child was sent to the wrong school for almost two weeks — the bus roster had bad information, and the note with the correct school was buried in her backpack where nobody saw it.

"We had a mom who put the child's info on a page in her backpack because this was a less verbal child," said Sara Catalinotto, who runs Parents to Improve School Transportation (PIST). "She wasn't going in and showing everybody the flyer. It was inside of her backpack, the note from mom."

What Parents Can Do: "Communicate up front and try to make a team with your bus team and yourself," Sara said, "because you can't really rely on the GPS or anything else."

Matt Berlin, who runs the nonprofit bus company NYCSBUS and previously headed the city's Office of Pupil Transportation, has seen a version of this failure from the inside. His company had a case this past summer with twins who look alike, share a bus stop, but ride different routes. The parent put the wrong twin on the wrong bus. The bus staff didn't catch it either.

"The safety here is the guardian/parent knowing the route number to put the child on the correct bus," Berlin said. "The bus staff confirming that the kid is 'theirs.' And the school being responsible when the child gets to the school to accept and support the child even if he or she is not 'theirs.'"

A mom had already reported her bus as unsafe — she said it sounded and smelled wrong — and it stayed in service anyway, breaking down in the dead of winter with pre-K kids on board. Sara from PIST described a version of this same failure from the webinar: a mom who'd grown up around her family's auto shop and could tell a bus was failing just by sound and smell.

"She could smell and hear that that bus was about to break down, and she refused to put her child on that bus," Sara said. "It definitely broke down in the middle of the winter with these little pre-K students on it."

Berlin says this does happen, but it's the exception, not the rule: buses are inspected by New York State twice a year, and drivers are required to report any defects every night. More often, he said, a parent's read on a bus turns out to be a false alarm.

What Parents Can Do: His advice either way: call the bus company directly, and file a complaint with OPT.

One family's child, picked up first on the route, ended up — in advocate Ruth DiRoma's words — "on the bus for an hour waiting for your kid to get on the bus," because a few minutes of delay at each stop kept stacking up.

DiRoma explained this is the logic behind the one-minute rule: if a stop runs five minutes over, every kid picked up after that sits through the same five minutes, and if a few more stops each run a little late too, that time compounds fast. In short, the bus driver is only required to wait one minute.

Berlin didn't dispute it. A typical route carries about 10 kids; two extra minutes at each stop is enough to back the whole thing up. The fix — smaller routes — comes with a real tradeoff, he said: the city pays per bus, driver, and attendant, so spreading the same number of kids across more buses means less money for other city priorities.

What Parents Can Do: Families being ready when the bus arrives helps, Berlin added, but so much of the delay is out of anyone's control: a kid who needs the bathroom, a broken elevator in an 8th-floor walkup.

A family found out the hard way that if no approved adult is there to receive a child, a bus supervisor can tell the driver to call police — the child goes to the precinct, and ACS may open a case against the family, even though the failure was the system's.

Sara laid out exactly how that happens: "If [the parent] is not there, the bus driver will keep the kid on the bus until they go back to the school. Or in some cases they'll go to the precinct, and then this triggers an ACS alert on that parent."

New translated versions of the DOE's emergency contact card are ready this year, and vendors are expected to print them and figure out which language each family needs.

The card may look different from last year's version, but the core question is the same: can the child be dropped off when no adult is there to receive them?

There's a formal procedure the bus matron or driver is supposed to follow if a family hasn't given permission for unattended drop-off: try to reach the parent, circle back.

But when there's simply no adult present and no way to know why — an inattentive (read: overwhelmed) parent, or a one-time emergency like a stuck subway — the system errs toward caution. That's what triggers the call to police, and from there, ACS.

One family approved for 1:1 support as part of their child's IEP transportation plan learned that without the para present, the driver simply won't pick up the child — as one parent put it in the PIST NYC Facebook group, "you have to get your child to school, or your child won't go to school that day" — and a sick para day means no yellow bus at all.

Berlin confirmed the rule is real and non-negotiable on his end: if a child's IEP requires a para, NYCSBUS has to follow it, the same as it would for a wheelchair lift or a place to secure an oxygen tank.

I've learned that transportation and the CSE — the Committee on Special Education — operate almost entirely separately, and they don't talk to each other the way you'd expect.

That disconnect creates an avoidable failure mode: IEPs expire after one year, and if a new one isn't held before the old one lapses, OPT can cut off busing entirely — not because anything about your child's needs changed, but because the paperwork technically expired.

The bus company sees an expired IEP and treats it as no busing at all, even if everyone agrees the need is exactly the same as it was the year before.

It's why any lawyer worth their fee will push to get transportation written explicitly into a settlement or stipulation, separate from whatever's on the IEP itself — because otherwise, an IEP that lapses becomes a lever the DOE can use to quietly stop busing, with no bad intent required on anyone's part. Just two departments that don't sync. If you're heading into a settlement or due process and want help getting this right, see our directory of NYC special education lawyers.

For everything that can go wrong, Berlin pointed to three things NYCSBUS has changed this year. Perhaps these can be a model for other vendors to copy.

The DOE's NYCSA data — the account parents log into to see route info — isn't something bus companies can access directly. So this year, NYCSBUS decided to build its own. "We are taking it on ourselves to collect that data," Berlin said.

Staff call every family on their routes to confirm the numbers on file — wrong numbers, families moving to a new number, and so on happens more often than you'd think. NYCSBUS is building a database from scratch so that when a parent calls in, staff already know who they're talking to. "We know how to reach people," he said.

Every family gets a physical card for the fridge. "It just says, 'Welcome to NYCSBUS. Here's our number. Here's the number to call at OPT. Here's a QR code to download the Via app. Here's a QR code that you can use to see what phone numbers we have for you, so you can update them,'" Berlin said.

There's a blank line for the student's ID, too. Berlin credited the idea partly to feedback from bus parents who are advocates: "That was an idea that we generated together."

When a parent calls asking where the bus is, NYCSBUS can text a live tracking link straight to their phone instead of troubleshooting the Via app. "Rather than fight about whether Via is working, we just have a system to just text a link," Berlin said.

"We hit a button. A link comes. You can see where the bus is." No login, no download required — it runs on a separate GPS system from Via, so it works even on the mornings the official app doesn't.

None of these fix the structural problems — the routing, the staffing shortages, the systems that don't talk to each other. But they're aimed at the right target: closing the gap between what's supposed to happen and what a family too often experiences on those difficult, difficult mornings.

For more NYC special education coverage, visit the Lighthouse homepage.

Getting a bus para assigned is the school's responsibility, not OPT's — and a missing para on a given day means the child can't ride, full stop.

A single complaint about a one-off late bus rarely triggers action — but repeated, documented complaints about the same route do get noticed. Report every time it happens, not just once.