New York City parents and lawmakers are calling on the state to pass legislation that would allow the city to overhaul its school bus system and provide better service for students with disabilities.
Each September, parents say they face many of the same problems: Children, many of them with disabilities, whose school buses never arrive to pick them up or take hours to bring them to and from school.
“Our school buses have been failing our children, our families, our schools, and it never, ever gets better. Why? Because the same school bus contracts have been in place for almost 50 years,” City Council Member Lincoln Restler said.
About 150,000 students take the school bus to class, relying on a system operated by more than 50 bus companies with city contracts that have not been rebid since 1979.
Advocates and elected officials say it is time to modernize the system, and they say the process needs to start in Albany with legislation that would allow the city to include employee protection provisions in new school bus contracts.
Those protections would allow union drivers to keep their jobs even if new bus companies win the contracts. Without those protections, advocates say bus drivers would almost certainly strike.
“We need to bring in new school bus contractors because for far too long, for far too long, we have had corrupt and incompetent school bus companies failing to deliver the service that our families deserve,” Restler said.
Last September, Samantha Senior’s son, Noah, who is neurodivergent and nonverbal, started kindergarten. He was legally entitled to bus transportation with time limits.
“Yet in spite of me doing everything I was supposed to do, Noah was not assigned a bus route until Nov. 11, 2025. That is more than two months after the school year began. And when he finally did receive the bus, it was a total of four hours of travel time. His school is 4.3 miles from our home,” Senior said.
Service has been better for Noah this year after Senior got help from the organization Advocates for Children. But the organization says many other parents are still struggling.
“We started this year with more than 2,000 students with disabilities who did not have buses at all. While there has been progress, we still have hundreds and hundreds of students today waiting for the school bus,” said Randi Levine of Advocates for Children.
The city has offered some of those students prepaid rideshare options to get to class in the meantime.
Last week, NY1 asked Mayor Zohran Mamdani about the bus problems and whether he was considering overhauling the system.
“This has been going on for decades, and it is not part of what our vision is for the future. Our vision is to be able to meet the needs of every single student in a uniform way, and we’re looking forward to exhausting conversations with our union partners, bus providers themselves, as well as within New York City public schools on all of the options we have in front of us,” Mamdani said.
The current bus contracts expire in June 2028.