PUBLIC TESTIMONY
Testimony by Chad Royer, Parent of Children with and without Disabilities
4:08:42
·
3 min
Chad Royer, a parent of two children including one with a disability, shared his extensive experience with school bus transportation issues in NYC. He offered several recommendations to improve the system, focusing on accountability, bus availability, and route planning.
- Suggested mandating additional emergency buses in bus company contracts to address breakdowns and driver shortages
- Proposed dedicating one bus per school to reduce delays and improve timeliness
- Criticized the OPT complaint process as unfair and inconsistent for parents
- Commented on Intro 515, suggesting additional points for consideration to strengthen the legislation
Chad Royer
4:08:42
Yes.
4:08:42
So good afternoon.
4:08:44
My name is Chad Royer, and I'm a parent of 2 children.
4:08:49
One who has a disability, and I'm a former parent association president in one school and a parent association vice president in another.
4:08:58
So my experience with Boston, I'm speaking as a parents, by the way.
4:09:03
My experience with busing delays is rather expensive and not without a pile of OPC complaints.
4:09:11
Many stories, many disappointments, but I also have a wealth of recommendations.
4:09:18
Sidebarring on the intro of 515.
4:09:22
I think it's important that we consider some other other points to be added to it for it to pass.
4:09:29
It's a good start.
4:09:30
But one idea I have when a bus contract is negotiated with a busing company, they'll be very helpful for accountability purposes to have a mandate of additional buses to be made available.
4:09:43
In the event that buses break down or drivers do or drivers are not available in order to get approved for the contract.
4:09:56
What buses breakdown oftentimes has been communicated that the driver would have to wait for a bus to return to route origin after returning from completing a trip.
4:10:06
This tells me that bus companies carry the bare minimum of buses per route, 1st school, and that bus companies will not prioritize having additional drivers and additional buses so that routes can be better planned out to carry more students to school in a timely manner.
4:10:25
This happened to me about a year or 2 ago where we actually got a bus company terminated for purposely violating the the mandate and One major thing was a bus kept breaking down, and there was no other bus available.
4:10:42
Some students do have them at a time on their IEP.
4:10:45
Some buses carry multiple school routes on the same trip.
4:10:49
When in fact this can cause delays in early arrival to school and late drop offs in the afternoon.
4:10:55
Why not concentrate on having one bus dedicated per school, one one dedicated school per bus as a start?
4:11:03
I would say, Please consider a stipulation of mandating a minimum of additional emergency buses available in accordance to the number of students traveling to schools so that we as parents We, as parents, don't have to wait long hours for replacement, plus that sometimes doesn't come.
4:11:28
Also, I just wanna end on this.
4:11:30
OPT complaints, is really not fair to the parents at large when we get results after having to escalate.
4:11:38
The final complaints, we're expecting a return.
4:11:43
It should be fair across the board.
4:11:45
But my idea to Yeah.
UNKNOWN
4:11:46
Thank you for your testimony.
