State ends scrutiny of Chicago Public Schools over long bus rides for students with disabilities

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Citing the district’s progress, Illinois state education officials are no longer formally monitoring Chicago Public Schools to ensure that students with disabilities don’t have overly long bus rides to school, Chalkbeat has learned.

The state notified the district in April that it was ending a corrective action that required the district to “make every effort” to keep commute times for students with disabilities to less than an hour. The state imposed the monitoring in fall 2022, after district leaders acknowledged that roughly 3,000 students with disabilities had longer bus trips than that, with 365 of those students on trips longer than 90 minutes.

In its effort to comply with the state plan and deal with a bus driver shortage, the district cut busing for general education students at the start of last school year, and reserved seats for students with disabilities, as well students who are homeless — groups that are entitled to transportation under federal law. It offered free Ventra transit cards to general education students who would have previously been eligible for bus service, largely those attending selective enrollment and magnet programs .

The district was able to shorten bus times for most students with disabilities, but the ride lengths edged up over the course of the school year as more students with disabilities applied for bus service.

At the start of last school year, 47 students with disabilities were on commutes longer than an hour. By March, that number grew to 130 students; a district spokesperson did not immediately provide more recent data.

“As ISBE has noted previously, there are various challenges involved in limiting travel times in a large, urban school district,” state officials wrote in an April letter notifying CPS that ISBE closed the corrective action.

Even so, they wrote, CPS “made sufficient progress” and “substantially corrected this issue on a systemic level.”

A spokesperson for the ISBE did not respond to requests for comment.

In a statement, CPS spokesperson Evan Moore said the district provided transportation to 9,356 students last school year, with a “vast majority” under an hour.

Federal mandates require public schools to serve students with disabilities, but not every Chicago public school has supports or resources to do so, especially for students with particular disabilities, such as those who are blind or deaf.

Whether or not a student with a disability gets bus service is determined in their Individualized Education Program.

Miriam Bhimani, one of the two people who filed the complaint that sparked the corrective action, said she doesn’t believe CPS has done enough to ensure students with disabilities are just as valued as other students.

“Without really addressing student assignments head on, we can still end up in situations where students are assigned a school that is very far from where they live,” Bhimani said.

The district remains under a separate corrective action plan focused on improving how students with disabilities are assigned to schools.

Moore said CPS is “continuing to explore and implement a comprehensive set of strategies” to provide transportation for students next school year, and that CPS will provide an update on busing later this summer. Officials announced in March that busing is not guaranteed next year for general education students.

Reema Amin is a reporter covering Chicago Public Schools. Contact Reema at ramin@chalkbeat.org .