This article was originally published in Honolulu Civil Beat.
When Mountain View Elementary on Hawaii Island began classes Monday, Aug. 5, Sherrie Galdeira was on the road with her son by 6:15 a.m. The Hawaii Department of Education had canceled school bus services for thousands of students just days before, and Galdeira was worried about fighting traffic with other parents who needed to drop off their children before the workday began.
By that Friday, Galdeira was exhausted and frustrated with the time and costs of taking her son to school. DOE offers mileage reimbursement for families driving to campus, but completing the paperwork wasn’t worth the small amount of money she’d receive in exchange, Galdeira said.
To save on gas money, Galdeira kept her son home from school that day.
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“My whole concern is, number one, effective communication from the DOE and the government,” Galdeira said. “They have to have known that this was coming.”
DOE restored bus routes for 23 schools, including Mountain View, on Monday, but 113 routes remain canceled for students on Oahu, the Big Island and Maui. This marks the third year in a row that DOE has made last-minute cancellations to its bus services for nearly 30,000 students.
Frustrated families and lawmakers are now demanding accountability from DOE and its contractor, Ground Transport Inc., which started the year unable to fill 147 of its routes. Ground Transport received the bulk of DOE’s bus contracts earlier this year and serves 10 of the 16 school complexes.
So far, the company has been able to restore five of its routes since the start of the school year. Ground Transport did not respond to requests for comment.
DOE has consolidated and canceled routes dating back to 2017 , and driver shortages have only worsened since the pandemic. Some lawmakers and others say Hawaii should reconsider the way it contracts out to bus companies – or if schools should be relying on private vendors at all.
“That’s the first hurdle in learning,” Rep. Amy Perruso said about the canceled routes. Perruso has previously proposed a pilot project that would allow DOE to own its own buses and provide transportation services to students.
DOE doesn’t have a timeline for restoring all of its routes, although Deputy Superintendent Randy Moore hopes all students will have access to bus transportation by the time the first quarter ends in early October.
Fewer Companies, Fewer Drivers
When DOE began a new round of bus contracts in July, the bulk of its business went to two companies – Roberts Hawaii and Ground Transport. A third company received routes for a single complex on Kauai.
Now, families and community members are questioning DOE’s decision to give Ground Transport so much responsibility for serving Hawaii schools. According to its website , Ground Transport took on 91 new schools and expanded its services to the Big Island for the first time this year.
Changes to the state’s contracting process, along with a steady decline in bus drivers, may explain DOE’s difficulties.
Around 2014, DOE revised its contracting process to drive down transportation costs and make bus routes more efficient, said Ray L’Heureux, who served as an assistant superintendent from 2012 to 2015. Instead of allowing bus companies to serve individual campuses, DOE asked vendors to bid on packages that grouped together multiple routes and schools.
The change required owners to serve more students and neighborhoods for several years at a time and made it harder for smaller companies to compete with statewide providers, who had huge fleets and hundreds of employees, said Cassie Akina-Ancog, general manager of Akina Tours & Transportation on Maui. Akina lost its bid to serve Maui schools in 2017 and hasn’t contracted with DOE since.
As smaller bus companies are pushed out of business, states may see a decline in their driver workforce, said Curt Macysyn, executive director of the National School Transportation Association. Long-time drivers may be unwilling to stay in the school bus business after their local company closes, he added.
It’s also difficult for small providers to survive when there’s so few drivers available in the state, said John Scovel, who formerly served as the general manager of Iosepa Transportation. A wave of workers retired during the Covid-19 pandemic, and it’s difficult for new employees to earn their specialized bus driver licenses and survive on jobs that only offer them a few hours of pay in the early mornings and afternoons, Scovel said.
“It’s a struggle because the cost versus the profit margin isn’t there,” Scovel said. Iosepa Transportation served Big Island schools until DOE chose not to extend its contract earlier this year.
What Happened?
DOE knew well before the start of school that Ground Transport was coming up short on employees. Companies need to submit a roster of their drivers 45 days before the new school year begins and complete a dry run of their routes over a week before classes start.
Moore said the department followed these procedures but believed Ground Transport would be able to hire more employees by the end of summer vacation. He said he wasn’t notified until late July that Ground Transport would be unable to fulfill more than 100 of its routes beginning Aug. 5.
To fill the gaps, Roberts Hawaii has entered into weekly contracts with DOE to restore nearly 30 routes that were originally assigned to Ground Transport. Moore said he’s unsure how much the department is paying Roberts for these services, but emphasized that Ground Transport is not receiving payment for the routes it isn’t covering.
Instead, he said, the unused money is going toward other transportation initiatives, like reimbursing parents for mileage or covering the cost of county bus passes for high school students.
Lawmakers have questioned why Ground Transport should keep its seven-year contract moving forward. The state will spend $85 million on school bus contracts for the 2024-25 academic year.
Up until this year, Roberts Hawaii covered some of the routes on Big Island, Oahu and Maui that Ground Transport is currently unable to serve, said JoAnn Erban, Roberts’ vice president of sales and marketing. The company has sufficient bus drivers and would be willing to take on more routes for the rest of the school year, Erban said.
When lawmakers pressed school leaders at a hearing Thursday on why they awarded so many contracts to Ground Transport earlier this year, Moore said DOE doesn’t necessarily award routes to the contractor with the lowest prices. Instead, the department places a heavy emphasis on other factors like a company’s safety procedures, its future plans to use zero-emission buses and its efforts to recruit and retain drivers.
But Erban said she believes DOE needs to place a greater consideration on a company’s track record of serving students. Roberts consistently covered 94% of its routes last year, she said, and has school buses and base yards throughout the state.
“At the end of the day, it’s up to them to make the changes,” Erban said about DOE’s approach to contracts.
Solutions On The Horizon
Moore told legislators the department’s focus is on restoring routes as quickly as possible. From there, he said, school leaders will start looking at future improvements.
For example, Moore said, DOE is considering staggering school start times so fewer drivers can cover more routes before classes start. Additionally, the department could potentially hire drivers as part-time cafeteria workers or custodians during the school day to provide them more steady employment, he said.
Perruso said the state could also look beyond private services for possible long-term answers.
On the mainland, some school districts have their own fleet of vehicles and run their own bus services. If Hawaii took a similar approach, Perruso said, DOE wouldn’t face the uncertainty of relying on outside contractors. It would also be easier for the department to hire employees who could split their time driving buses and working on campus, although the state could face a large upfront cost in purchasing its own school buses.
“We definitely need to be thinking about transition, because the status quo isn’t working,” Perruso said.
This story was originally published on Honolulu Civil Beat .
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