FARMINGTON — Farmington Public Schools is fining its bus contractor $100 for every split or doubled bus run, and since the company was told the fines had started, there have not been any. Whether that is the fines working or a driver shortage solved, the district's finance chief would not say.
"Does that mean they finally got the driver shortage taken care of, or they don't want $100 fines? I can't say with any certainty," Dan Zittoun, the assistant superintendent of finance and operations, told the Board of Education on Sept. 14. "I'll just say that everyone can come up with their own conclusion on that."
This is the district's third year with Specialty Transportation. The first opened with buses running hours late and ended with a $7,000 credit. The second, in Zittoun's telling, was "by all accounts, a good year." This one started "highly disappointing," badly enough that the district invoked the penalty clause in its contract. The fines are tallied monthly against Specialty's invoice.
Specialty's explanation, as Zittoun relayed it: the company has the number of spare drivers the contract requires but is still getting a high level of driver call-outs. His answer to the company's local managers was that if call-outs are a pattern, get more spare drivers, from Avon or Berlin or wherever Specialty has them. "You need to solve this."
The company has also changed hands. Zittoun said the district met with representatives of Beacon, "who is now the parent company to Specialty who purchased them." A federal notice published April 17 fills in the rest: two subsidiaries of Beacon Mobility Corp., which already owned 23 bus companies, applied in March to buy Specialty from its sole owner, and regulators tentatively approved the sale. Zittoun said Beacon is not changing the local staff. It has offered to pay for bus cameras that upload to the cloud, instead of the memory cards that now have to be pulled by hand to review an incident on board.
Every bus already carries a GPS tracker. Families cannot see it, because cell service is spotty in parts of town and a spare bus keeps the old bus's identity in the app. "We don't want to create false scares," Zittoun said. Board member Beth Kintner asked for something simpler, the alert New Britain parents get when a bus leaves the school. Zittoun said the district would explore it.
Nobody on the board defended the start of the year. "It's gross incompetence," said James Rackliffe, the vice chair, "and something needs to be done." Angela Cianci said she hears about it on the soccer fields, that parents are simply taking their children off the buses, and that after three years of driver shortages the fix is not complicated: "They need to pay them more and take it out of their profit."
Superintendent Jess Giannini said the GPS and the hotline questions are symptoms. "If the buses are running on time and they're more reliable on a regular basis, we're not having this conversation."
Also from the Sept. 14 meeting: the district will measure classroom screen time before cutting it, and the schools closed the year $248,435 ahead.
This coverage is supported by Farmington Storage, 155 Scott Swamp Road, the only storage facility in Connecticut with Museum air. Nothing in the building is running 20 minutes behind where the app says it is. 860.777.4001 📦
Jack Beckett has covered Farmington's school buses since the first September they were late. He is on his second coffee. ☕
The Farmington Mercury covers the town nobody else is covering: the school board meeting that ran past 10 p.m., the police log that is technically public record, the zoning vote at the end of your street. We publish slowly, deliberately, and without apology. Always last to breaking news. farmingtonmercury.com #WeAreFarmington 📰