Long before a lawsuit detailed the shameful ways that a lack of reliable school bus service has been burdening local families, D.C. officials knew they were failing disabled students.
They knew that when a mother of a child with Down syndrome shared that she was forced to use the money she had saved for her daughter’s birthday presents to pay for a Lyft ride to get her child to school.
They knew that when a mom started posting a list of delayed bus routes on social media and found she had to keep posting day after day. More than 260 days later, she is still posting about delays.
They knew. They knew students with disabilities were getting to school late or not at all. They knew those students were sitting on buses for long stretches of time and sometimes arriving at their destinations agitated and soiled from going to the restroom on themselves. They knew families were worried and frustrated and fed up.
Most of the city’s students take public transportation to get to school, but the city is required to provide transportation for more than 4,000 students with physical or intellectual disabilities. On Thursday, attorneys representing some of those families and a national disability rights organization filed a class action complaint against the city. The complaint describes that legal action as aiming to remedy the city’s “systemic failures, which violate federal and DC law.”
“Every day,” reads the complaint, “the District of Columbia and its Office of the State Superintendent of Education (“OSSE”) inexcusably fail to meet their basic obligation to ensure students with disabilities have safe, reliable, and appropriate transportation to and from school.”
Every day. That phrasing matters. It shows the frequency in which families have been left holding their breath. Every day parents and other caretakers wake up and don’t know if their children’s buses will arrive on time or at all. Every day they accept that they may have to scramble to drive their children to or from school or call for a car service. Every day they wait and brace.
I am familiar with the frustrations of those families because they been sharing their experiences with me for more than a year. In February 2023, I first wrote about the late and no-show school buses. Then, in August 2023, shortly after the school year began, I wrote about the issue again.
That week, a 12-year-old boy who attends a school for children and young adults with intellectual disabilities watched his bus arrive without the hardware that connects to a harness he needs to wear while riding the bus because he has seizures. He then watched the bus drive away without him. The boy’s mother described him as mostly nonverbal and recalled him asking over and over, “Where bus go?” That same week, a girl who has cerebral palsy and uses a wheelchair, was supposed to arrive home at 3:20 p.m. and her bus dropped her off after 5.
City officials knew all of this. They knew it because families were telling them, and not just through the media. They were sending emails, making phone calls and asking lawmakers for help.
It shouldn’t take a lawsuit for the city to do right by disabled students. In an effort to increase attendance among all students in the city, D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser’s administration put in place an initiative called “Every Day Counts.” An online description of it reads, “Going to school every day is critical to our students realizing their hopes and dreams.” If every day counts, every student should also count. When buses don’t show up, students don’t get on them. When buses show up late, students lose time that should be spent learning, interacting with their peers or receiving specialized services. The city’s disabled students deserve reliable bus service. More than that, they have a right to reliable bus service.
“Defendant’s failure to provide safe, reliable, and appropriate transportation, thereby denying students with disabilities equal access to their education and unnecessarily segregating them, is precisely the type of discrimination and segregation that the [Americans With Disabilities Act] was enacted to prevent and prohibit,” reads the complaint. The complaint, which names five families and the Arc of the United States as plaintiffs, was signed by attorneys with Children’s Law Center, Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs, The Arc of the United States and the law firm McDermott Will & Emery.
My colleague Lauren Lumpkin wrote an article detailing the lawsuit. For that, she spoke to a parent who was forced to buy a car because of the frequent bus delays. The guardian of another child told her that the bus once dropped him off at the wrong school and another time at his late mother’s house. “As he’s getting off the bus, he’s excited like he’s going to see his mom,” she said. The family had to split up that day to find him.
An OSSE spokesman did not provide a statement for that article, explaining that the agency does not comment on pending litigation. But city officials, to their credit, have previously acknowledged that service has been unreliable. They attributed that in part to a national driver shortage and took steps toward making improvements. Those include posting delayed bus routes on a website and reimbursing families if they arrange for alternative transportation.
But the city hasn’t done nearly enough to make sure that every student counts. If it had, families wouldn’t be suing.
Delays happen. But they should be infrequent. They should be exceptions. The complaint shows the breadth of the problem by pointing to OSSE’s own data: “In just the first five months of the current 2023-2024 school year, there were over 1,000 delays and cancellations. From January 30, 2023-March 15, 2023, there were more than 1,500 route delays and cancellations. In the week just before the filing of this Complaint, there were over 100 routes delayed.”
The city, of course, already knew that.
