Big yellow school buses rumble countless students over millions of miles in the Roanoke Valley each year, at great effort and expense to ensure their educations.
It’s “a tremendous, complex, meticulous” endeavor getting students to and from school every day, said Chris Perkins, chief operating officer for Roanoke City Schools.
“It’s not just to and from school,” Perkins said. “Our kids get transportation to and from games, activities, practice. All of those things, and we provide that.”
All the district’s combined programs — midday preschool, field trips, afterschool care and others — require a crisscrossing of bus routes like a spiderweb, Perkins said. And the routes are ever-changing to meet students’ shifting needs.
“The fact that we want to provide these services, it creates a complexity that is hard to explain,” Perkins said. “It looks like spaghetti when you put all the routes on the screen using our software.”
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Buses run from 6:15 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. every day, he said. Last school year, the fleet of 157 buses traveled a combined 2.9 million miles, according to data provided by Roanoke schools.
“Our service has exceeded our capability,” Perkins said. “We’re hoping to find opportunities to revise some of this.”
The schools’ contracted transportation provider struggled for years with late buses, so the district recently signed on with a new company.
“Right now, we have between 850 and 1,000 kids, depending on the day, that may be late to school,” Perkins said. “We have a hard time filling bus drivers. We’re hoping for the best with Zum.”
Arriving from California is a student transportation company called Zum (pronounced zoom). Roanoke schools signed a 5-year, $77 million contract for Zum to take over bus services starting this summer.
Zum’s Chief Operating Officer Vivek Garg said it’s past time to modernize the United States’ largest mass transit system. He said 27 million students use schools buses each day, compared to 9 million airline fliers daily.
“It doesn’t matter whether with Zum or with anyone else, the whole market has to change,” Garg said. “That’s what we are focused on.”
Garg co-founded the company alongside his siblings in 2014. Zum operates in seven states today, including school districts far larger than Roanoke, with expansion into Virginia and three other states this year.
Garg’s sister, CEO Ritu Narayan, was their first driver, he said.
“We realized that school transportation has remained very antiquated … It is still on pen and paper, walkie-talkies,” Garg said. “I can track my pizza, but I don’t know where my child is.”
He said Zum has improved bus route efficiency, invested in its fleets, and offers a smartphone app for parents to track their kids’ buses.
“We let every parent rate their school bus experience every day on the mobile app, on a five-star basis,” Garg said. “Any time a parent is rating three stars or below … Ritu and I will get an email immediately.”
He said that’s the kind of passion and high bar of service Zum is trying to make an industry standard.
“We will not only solve that challenge for that parent,” Garg said. “We will actually improve the entire system.”
Workforce shortages have been a widely cited issue, not just in Roanoke.
“Somehow it has been a rhetoric that it’s a national challenge, school bus driver shortage is an issue,” Garg said. “In any of our contracts, Zum doesn’t have a driver shortage today. We have zero driver shortage.”
The company is hiring 130 bus drivers in Roanoke. The school district and Zum hosted a hiring event last week, with more outreach planned.
“There’s no magic wand. It comes with a lot of hard work, and staying on top of it,” Garg said. “Look in Roanoke, literally the salary of drivers is going up by around $5 an hour. And their benefits package.”
By the numbers, bus drivers go the distance shuttling kids all over school districts in the Roanoke and New River valleys.
To transport its 13,700 students those 2.9 million bus miles last year, Roanoke schools budgeted $13.6 million, contracted out to Durham School Services, data said.
Roanoke County enrolls about 1,000 more students, but manages its transportation internally rather than by contract.
About 150 county buses traveled some 700,000 miles fewer than city routes, at a lower cost of $12.3 million last school year, according to data provided by Roanoke County Schools.
Student transportation is generally an expense that increases each year, as wages and fuel costs go up. That’s what will drive increases in Roanoke County next year, a spokesperson said.
In Roanoke, the school district’s 5-year, $77 million contract averages to about $15.4 million per year. It’s an increase from costs paid to the previous contractor, but buses are still late in Roanoke, said the Perkins, the schools’ operations chief.
“The great thing is we’ve never cancelled a route,” Perkins said. “We may be late, but we’ll come get our students.”
Nearby in Montgomery County, which enrolls 9,400 students, 114 buses logged 1.2 million miles last school year, with a transportation budget of almost $6.5 million for the school district, according to data provided.
Salem is smaller, with about 3,600 enrolled, yet still budgets close to $2.5 million per year for student transportation, a spokesperson said. Salem’s fleet went almost 400,000 total miles last year.
Perkins said his father drove school buses for 20 years in Smyth County, when Perkins was a kid.
“The same problems that I’m dealing with, he tells me stories,” Perkins said.
Although not much has changed until now, change is en route under Roanoke schools’ new bus contract, Perkins said.
For one thing, the district with its spiderweb of routes goes above the legal requirements to provide student transportation, he said.
“Roanoke City Public Schools does not want to give up anything it has,” Perkins said. “However, we’re at the point where we have to have discussions about what is mandated and what is optional.”
Perkins said the school board will discuss responses from a transportation survey during its next meeting on April 23. More than 3,600 people participated in the survey, illustrating the topic’s importance among parents, students and staff.
“We can’t continue to do the same thing and hope there to be a great outcome,” Perkins said. “We’ve got to make sure that we give the opportunity for Zum to be as successful as possible.”
Garg said Zum is keen to deliver. Their focus is transforming a legacy industry, backed by venture capital investors rather than private stakeholders seeking quick returns, he said.
“We do not have to run our company on a quarter-by-quarter basis,” Garg said. “We are taking a very long-term view.”
Toward the long-term, Roanoke schools is planning to eventually transition to an alternative-fuel fleet, like perhaps electric-powered buses. Fuel efficiency for some gas and diesel school buses is less than 10 mpg, according to web results.
“Electrification is always a journey,” Garg said. “We will be working with the school district on that.”
Zum’s headquarters in Redwood City, California, is more than a bus ride away from Roanoke. But even further still is the small town in India where Garg said his mother forewent her career as a math teacher to ensure he and his siblings reliably got to school.
“If you ask my mom, she would have never thought that three of us would work together and start something like this,” Garg said of his sibling coworkers. “But it’s a problem on which we all aligned.”
And now that Roanoke is aligned with Zum for student transport, Perkins said they’re seeking drivers who are getting behind the wheel for the right reasons. For the love of student learning.
“We know that we’ve got to get kids to school on time, and home on time,” Perkins said. “You’ve got to be a very specific-minded individual to take that job on. If you want that challenge, we got a job for you.”