A New School Year is Here—And So Are School Bus Delays

Approximately 150,000 New York City children ride buses to school, including around 66,000 students with disabilities and students living the shelter system. When there’s a problem with bus service, these groups are usually the ones who suffer most.

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As the new school year kicked off last month, iconic yellow school buses are rolling again through the streets of New York City. But some are running behind schedule.

The Road to Better Busing Coalition, made up of advocates and parents affected by bus delays and other issues, are rallying for improvements. 

New York is the largest school district in the country, so it also has the largest school bus system. Approximately 150,000 children ride these buses, the majority of whom are Latino and Black, according to researchers.

Around 66,000 bus riders are students with disabilities and students living in temporary housing, including those staying in the city’s shelter system. When there’s a problem with bus service, these groups are usually the ones who suffer most.

“Each year, as the school year begins, there’s one thing we can count on: our phones will ring off the hook with calls from families whose children can’t get to school due to school bus service failures,” said Randi Levine, policy director of Advocates for Children of New York, during remarks at a rally outside City Hall in late September.

During the 2023–2024 school year, in a network of 9,000 school bus routes braiding city streets, there were 80,000 delays. In just the first weeks of the 2025-2026 school year, there have been 4,476 no-shows and 8,068 reported bus delays and breakdowns as of last week, city officials said.

Most of the problems in the latter category are delays (7,629) while there were 439 breakdowns in September, according to New York City’s Public Schools (NYCPS, formerly known as the Department of Education).

NYCPS cautioned that the Office of Pupil Transportation (OPT) manages the tracker for school bus delays and breakdowns, and said there may be errors in the data.

When these incidents happen, parents can submit complaints in a few ways: use ServiceNow to call the OPT Service Desk (which offers translation services in multiple languages), use SupportHub to submit online, or send an email to NYCPS.

“We work diligently to resolve any issues families have with their services so that every student gets to school on time,” an education department spokesperson said in a statement. “That’s why we introduced modern GPS tracking for buses, expanded communication tools to families, and made route planning improvements to better meet students’ needs.”

However, Gothamist reported in early September that the GPS for school buses in New York City has flaws: drivers and bus companies do not consistently log into the system, which also relies on self-reported inputs.

Mia Greenidge is a senior manager for youth transition services at IncludeNYC—an organization helping young people with disabilities—as well as the mother of a 5-year-old kindergartener who uses specialized busing. Her son was dropped off at the wrong school building during the first few days of school, she said.

“We were lucky in this situation,” Greenidge said, explaining that her son was delivered to the right location in about 20 minutes. “The school that he got dropped off to was maybe a few blocks away [from his correct school].”

Another time, Greenidge said her son was on the bus for almost two hours, despite living 30 minutes away from his school. “In trying to follow up with the bus company—the dispatcher or the management at the bus company—I never was able to actually speak to anyone there. So a lot of it was me communicating with the school,” she said.

Levine said Advocates for Children of New York has received a lot of complaints about bus services this school year so far, and in 40 cases, had to call the education department to resolve the issue.

Lori Podvesker, director of disability and education policy at IncludeNYC, said the organization has noticed a 20 percent increase in bus complaints compared to the same time last year. Out of 27 calls IncludeNYC received about transportation issues, 13 were about buses that didn’t show up, she said.

The education department, meanwhile, said it has received more complaints for no-show buses than late ones this month: 4,476 and 4,270, respectively.

There are repercussions for students when they arrive late to school or back home, advocates and parents say. They may be missing out both on classroom time and on specialized services. Greenidge said her son goes to applied behavior analysis therapy after school. She schedules the appointments with some leeway, but when the bus delays are long, he ends up missing them.

“That costs money, because when you have to cancel a session, they still charge you,” she said.

Another problem is the duration of many students’ bus trip. Parents to Improve School Transportation, a community-based organization that advocates for better bus services, shared the story of a family whose son’s route zigzags all over Manhattan for more than two hours, causing their child to wet himself on the long ride. 

For many years, advocates and parents have pointed to the 46-year-old contract between the NYCPS and school bus companies, as well as a shortage of drivers, as root causes of the problem. 

Sara Catalinotto, co-founder of Parents to Improve School Transportation, said that the city needs to better recruit and retain drivers.* Podvesker told City Limits that the city should encourage more companies to compete for contracts. Advocates are also calling on the city to not extend busing contracts without accountability.

“As an organization focused on education, we want to spend our time advocating for what happens inside the classroom—ensuring students have the support they need to thrive. But instead, we are forced to spend our energy fighting just to make sure students can get to school in the first place,” Levine said to the crowd during the late September rally. “This has to change.”

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* A previous version of this story incorrectly attributed this information to the wrong source. City Limits regrets the error.