Behind School Bus Mess, a 45-Year-Old Contract That’s Hard to Change
The New York Times
Students across New York City are waiting up to an hour for school buses as a driver shortage and conflict over a contract hamstring the city’s ability to find a solution.
Less than a month into the school year, Dawn Akerley has developed a very particular morning routine.
She dashes outside at around 7 a.m., when her son’s school bus is supposed to arrive, to see whether it is waiting at the curb. Usually, it isn’t. She leaves her son, Jace, who is 6 years old and autistic, unattended inside their first-floor apartment in Queens while she repeats this process every 20 minutes until the bus arrives, some days as late as 8:30 a.m.
The bus route originates in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and stretches about 20 miles east to Far Rockaway, Queens, before Jace is picked up in Richmond Hill, a neighborhood 10 miles to the north. The driver bypasses his school and stops at two others before dropping Jace off. Most days, Ms. Akerley said, he does not get to school until 10 a.m. — two hours late.
“It’s so detrimental to his entire day,” she said, adding that Jace had failed his first math test of the year because he was consistently missing class.
Ms. Akerley is just one of many New York City parents whose children use school buses and are not being picked up on time. A broad swath of those parents have children with disabilities or learning differences that require the city to provide a special education plan, which not only guarantees their right to transportation, but also stipulates that they cannot spend more than 90 minutes getting to school.
Students from kindergarten through sixth grade who live over a mile from school are also eligible for bus transportation.
A businessman in the Bronx falsified information on thousands of returns, committing one of the largest tax frauds in Department of Justice history, prosecutors said.
Officials in Wisconsin gave little new information on Tuesday about a shooting that left a student and a teacher dead and six others injured.
The president-elect’s latest attempt to overturn his Manhattan conviction was rebuffed by the judge overseeing the case, who called it “mere hearsay and conjecture.”
Undocumented immigrants whose children or spouses are U.S. citizens are feeling particularly vulnerable to President-elect Donald J. Trump’s threats to push them out.
The man whom authorities call a serial killer was charged with second-degree murder in the case of Valerie Mack, who disappeared in 2000.
The Commerce Department is banning the few remaining operations of China Telecom in the United States, a move that appears unlikely to deter Beijing from conducting sophisticated cyberoperations.
The police in Wisconsin are working to establish a motive for the attack, which left a student and teacher dead and six others injured.
The defendant, Rex Heuermann, is due in court Tuesday. Investigators have been trying to tie him to other unsolved killings on Long Island.
Some Republicans have said that a constitutional convention is overdue. Many Democratic-led states have rescinded their long-ago calls for one, and California will soon consider whether to do the same.
The New York City Campaign Finance Board voted to withhold as much as $4.3 million in matching funds from Mayor Eric Adams, hampering his re-election bid.
He built Mississippi’s Republican Party into a conservative powerhouse, making himself a regional power broker in the process.