Hundreds of buses that transport kids to schools around D.C. have experienced significant delays since the start of the month, leaving parents scrambling to get their kids to and from school everyday.

On Friday morning alone, the D.C. Office of the State Superintendent for Education, which runs 530 bus routes that transport some 3,700 kids to and from school, said that there were delays of up to 90 minutes on 104 bus routes. Two routes weren’t serviced at all. On Thursday morning, 108 bus routes were experiencing delays, while on Tuesday and Wednesday it was some 80 morning bus routes impacted each day.

The impacts are even more pronounced because of who is feeling them: Unlike many jurisdictions, in D.C. school buses are only used to transport kids who have disabilities, some of whom are traveling outside the city for specialized education services they cannot access in D.C. Additionally, more than half of the kids in D.C. that rely on the buses live east of the Anacostia River in the city’s lowest-income neighborhoods. (For 17 years D.C. was under federal supervision due to a class action lawsuit over the city’s inability to get kids with disabilities to school. That lawsuit was dismissed in 2012.)

“These are children who have developmental delays and are medically fragile and the kids who need consistent routines to not flip out,” says Elizabeth Daggett, a Ward 5 resident whose 12-year-old son faced bus delays last week. “The whole point is families who have kids who are disabled are already strained, but when their support systems fail, it becomes overwhelming.”

“There has been an impact with attendance,” says Amy Warden, the principal at St. Coletta of Greater Washington, which focuses on educating students with disabilities. “It can be hard for [students]. If they get here late they don’t get the start of the day they usually do. They don’t understand why they’re still at school in the evening. When the child gets home, the parents can tell the kid is a little off in their routine.”

Daggett says the delays have impacted her family in a number of ways. Her son has a dedicated aide in school, so when he’s not able to attend, one parent needs to be with him during the day. Late last week, his bus was delayed in getting him home after school. “He came home, and he wears a pull up and it was full. He’s non-verbal and can’t tell people if he’s tired or hungry or thirsty. He almost missed medication last week,” she says.

D.C. officials say the delays have been caused by a confluence of events they say are largely out of their control. They say that like many other jurisdictions, D.C. has faced challenges in hiring and retaining bus drivers. Additionally, the uptick in respiratory illnesses that have been floating around since late last year have led to an increase in the number of drivers who call out sick.

“We’re facing these challenges because we have a shortage of drivers and attendants this school year, and we have also experienced higher-than-average staff callouts, which impacts timely service for students, depending on the route,” says Michael Riley, the director of student transportation for OSSE. “Without adequate staffing to cover all routes, we have had to make difficult and complex decisions to meet ridership demands, including: Combining routes and adding more children onto a bus route; sending our drivers and attendants out to run multiple routes consecutively; and as a last resort, dropping and not servicing routes.”

Daggett says she understands that a shortage of bus drivers may be a contributing factor, but also thinks that OSSE initially fell short in how it communicated with parents about delays. While the agency started providing real-time updates on Twitter and its website this week, Daggett says there was less active communication last week.

“Last week it was crickets. I was on hold [on a parent hotline] for an hour and 20 minutes,” she says. “This week, at least knowing I can look up if my kid’s route is late, that helps us make decisions.”

Warden says that OSSE officials seem to grasp the seriousness of the situation, and are responding as best they can. She says they attended a parent townhall at St. Coletta’s this week to address the ongoing delays. “OSSE’s been pretty responsive to us about their plan,” she says.

“We are having some success in stabilizing our staffing levels. As of right now, we have 25 drivers and attendants in the final stages of pre-employment,” says Riley. “But, we still need more drivers and attendants to be fully staffed. We are planning a hiring fair in February that will allow us to hire more staff faster.”

Still, some elected officials think that while OSSE is being responsive now, the current delays should not have come to pass to begin with.

“COVID created hiring challenges, but staffing shortages should have been identified earlier so incentives could have been used to slow attrition & accelerate hiring. I’m glad there’s a corrective action plan in place, but this never should have reached a crisis point,” wrote Eric Goulet, the Ward 3 representative on the D.C. State Board of Education, on Twitter.

In the meantime, OSSE says that families who opt to use rideshare services to get their kids to school can request reimbursement. But even that can be challenging for some low-income families, says Daggett, since reimbursements can take up to 60 days to come through.

“If it happens on one day it’s too much, but two weeks?” she says of the bus delays. “It is so frustrating and causes us major problems.”