For many Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools students and parents, the first weeks of the new school year were marred by issues with buses. A data issue and lack of timely response by the district’s transportation office led to hundreds of students expecting school bus assignments being left without one – and even three weeks into the school year, CHCCS leaders are still working to resolve the issue.
The Board of Education and members of the public got an extensive update last Thursday about what went haywire and what is being done.
After sending an apology to families during the first week of school when the bus assignment problems arose, CHCCS Superintendent Rodney Trice offered another apology to families to begin the discussion with board members. He acknowledged the “significant disruption” many district families have experienced and said another apology was necessary because the district understands “the seriousness of what they are experiencing.”
CHCCS Superintendent Rodney Trice addresses the Board of Education from the podium as part of the September 4 meeting. (Photo via Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools.)
“Some students have been dropped from our systems,” Trice said. “Families have received conflicting or incomplete information. Parents have had to rearrange work schedules to find alternative transportation, as was shared earlier, and [had] to spend far too much time trying to get answers from us. Our families expected reliable transportation and clear communication, and this was at the start of the school year… too many did not experience that.”
Chief Operations Officer André Stewart presented to the board alongside Director of Transportation Thaddeus Alston. He said many of those problems stem from a bad download of data submitted by schools and families from Infinite Campus to the Transportation Information Management System (TIMS), which is used to develop transportation routes. The number of requests looked normal, if not higher than normal – and because of that, Stewart said staff did not realize many of the bus assignments were either incorrect or dropped entirely during the transfer of information. The Transportation Department was unaware of the software problem until the first day of class, when hundreds of calls flooded the office asking where the bus service was or where assignments could be found.
Stewart called it “an absolute data nightmare,” which could only be resolved by individually reviewing update requests by hand. While the district administrators are working with TIMS to review what happened with the incorrect data, the easiest self-inflicted mistake to identify is the timeline for creating bus routes, which is not started until June and sees assignments distributed in August.
“We were using a time frame that CHCCS has used for probably two decades and we were caught in a perfect storm,” Stewart said. “The time frame failed us. Our software failed us. We had a retirement in the middle of the summer. And the information that we received was insufficient for us to know that there was a problem with this magnitude.”
CHCCS Chief Operations Officer André Stewart (right) and Director of Transportation Thaddeus Alston (left) listen to feedback from the Board of Education during the September 4 meeting. (Photo via Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools.)
While the apologies might be appreciated, said Board of Education members, they don’t reroute buses and put students in seats. Roughly 800 request updates remained as of Thursday and board members said they were continuing to hear from parents, even during the meeting. Many of the elected officials questioned the rate at which those requests are being handled and whether the scope of the debacle has been fully captured. Board Member George Griffin shared frustration about the bad data transfer not being recognized by staff and urged the transportation department to react more broadly to meet students’ ongoing need for buses rather than following normal protocols.
“The system’s not working,” Griffin said in the most heated moment of the meeting. “We’re not going to get 800 kids back [on buses] in another week. It’s the third week of school next week. The kitchen’s on fire. Somebody needs to go out there and find out who’s got a bus problem, not waiting for parents to contact you for the third time saying, ‘Nobody’s told me anything for nine days.’ That’s just not good enough.”
Board Member Barbara Fedders said the lack of answer around why this issue happened this summer instead of last year – when the district first transitioned student data to the Infinite Campus software – clouds how the district can respond. But she echoed Griffin in questioning the transportation office’s failure to recognize and initially respond to the issue foreshadowed in the summer.
“I don’t understand why we didn’t hire somebody faster after the person quit in the middle of the summer — and I don’t understand why we didn’t get [temporary workers] right away, like on August 25,” she said. “I’m upset also, like George, and it’s not getting matched. I’m not feeling enough urgency in any of this…I’m not an operations expert, but it’s something has to happen that’s different.”
CHCCS Board of Education Member Vickie Feaster Fornville speaks as part of the school bus and Transportation Office update during the September 4 meeting. (Photo via Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools.)
Board Member Vickie Feaster Fornville responded by saying she believes it’s important for the CHCCS staff to not feel attacked by the board members during the response to this problem.
“Our families are hurting and the kitchen may be on fire – but we’re not going to act like we don’t have water from University Lake and OWASA,” she said, responding to Griffin. “We’re going to deal with this and we’re going to get it fixed. I, as a board member, say I’m sorry to our families.
“I, as a former bus driver, will be glad to volunteer my time and get in a van to help you get our children to school,” Feaster Fornville added. “What I want to know is how and what is the fastest way to get every little person on a bus in a van and a car?”
In addition to the students whose data was lost, several families were confused by an update in the district’s walk zones. CHCCS chose this year to better enforce and implement walk zones in the system based on state laws, with students within a 1.5-mile range of their school often not qualifying for bus service. But the changes were not communicated enough times to families and missed several families who recently moved into those walk zones, according to the district’s early review. That aspect of the bus assignment missteps similarly deserves scrutiny, said Board Member Meredith Ballew.
“The descriptions that we’re getting from a lot of families who are affected by that [change] are like, ‘This is not safe…my kindergartner can’t cross Smith Level [Road]… you know, just things like that,” she told Stewart. “And it just made me feel a little uneasy that those [changes] were kind of just decided without board approval. I know two years ago
there were some changes…I remember voting on a change that was due to the state regulations or the state’s recommendations. And you know, that seemed like that was a bigger board approval process. So, this time, [parents complaining] was the first I’d heard of it.
“That concerned me,” Ballew concluded, “and I still don’t have a sense of how many families were affected by that.”
CHCCS leaders have stressed that the bus assignment issues that have roiled the start of the 2026-27 year are not for a lack of drivers. The district led a push around 2023 to raise their driver pay to improve recruitment and retention, which has largely worked at steadying its workforce. (Photo via Town of Chapel Hill.)
Matthew Palm is the undergraduate studies director for UNC’s City and Regional Planning Department. He told Chapelboro not only have many people in the department been impacted by the assignment issues, but the incident raises their curiosity to what happened and how everyone responds. While not intimately familiar with the district’s review and data transfer mishap, Palm said it is not unusual at a time when public school funding is being threatened and districts are forced to either cut corners or multi-task employees. Often, he said, communication and implementation are where things get rocky.
“Costs for school buses have gone up and many school districts across the country are just struggling to maintain these services,” Palm said. “And they’re trying to do things like this, where they try to get the most bang for their buck by redesigning routes, combining different types of services and introducing [or enforcing] these kinds of walk zones. The rollout for something this big [every year], I wouldn’t be surprised that something went wrong.”
The transportation planning researcher added that his department ran a survey of CHCCS and Durham parents about school transportation options a few years ago. Largely based on this ongoing incident, a team is conducting a new survey and looks to build off that study. Describing it as a “natural experiment” to track how people are having to pivot and change their routines based on a short-term lack of transportation, he said it provides an opportunity for people to study the broader impacts of school bus services. As of Tuesday, 80 parents have already responded to the survey.
“It becomes a story about resilience, which can also reveal for whom this becomes urgently important service,” Palm said. “As parents [are] dealing with this and telling us about it, they’re also going to be telling us things like, ‘We tried walking, and it didn’t work,’ or, ‘We tried this [instead].’ Those lessons are going to be really useful for that long-term picture of how we build a total transportation system that’s resilient and supportive to families.”
In the short term and beyond the student-by-student reviews, schools are filling out spreadsheets of students who rely on buses to keep track of the weekly ridership. A former transportation employee trained on TIMS who was moved into another division is being brought back temporarily to help with the manual routing and the school board approved the hiring of a new person to replace the staffer who retired in the summer. And Stewart added that district staff met with the software company and provided its logs to it last week with the goal of discovering why the transfer from Infinite Campus went wrong.
Long-term solutions, according to Stewart and Trice, include a district-wide review of how the transportation office’s operations overlap with other relevant departments. Stewart said he plans to also overhaul the timeline for gathering bus requests and creating bus routes, moving that process to March-April and alerting parents in June what students’ assignments are for the upcoming school year.
In the meantime, the Board of Education asked district staff to provide weekly updates on how many correction requests remain, as well as preventing any students impacted from the transportation issues from being punished at their school.
“I know generally for transportation, if kids are late and things like that, it gets noted as excused and they’re not penalized for it,” Chair Riza Jenkins said to punctuate her comments. “But I think also, Dr. Trice, it would go a long way that if kids miss assignments because they’ve missed the entire first period or whatever…that we ask the teachers [to] provide some flexibility.”
For any CHCCS students still not receiving bus service who need it, families are encouraged to contact Stewart and Alston directly by email (adstewart@chccs.k12.nc.us or thaddeus.alston@chccs.k12.nc.us).
The full Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools Board of Education meeting from Thursday, September 4, can be watched here.
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