Since the beginning of the school year, the delayed arrival of school buses has affected the students who ride them. These students are faced with the challenge of arriving late to school every day, which, paired with the wait for the metal detector line, causes many students to arrive late. The reason for buses being late stems from the arrival of buses at bus stops, as many buses tend to arrive after 8:00 am and don’t get to school until around 8:20 am.

When speaking to students who ride my late bus, they share the same problem of arriving to school late and being tardy pretty much every first block. This not only looks bad on PowerSchool, but students are also missing beginning class instructions. This issue also affects teachers who have to deal with catching up with multiple students missing important beginning-of-class instructions and having to update PowerSchool to catch up with the late overflow of students.

The problem has even reached the point where staff has now been giving out special pink passes specifically for late bus students. These passes are handed out to students as they come off the bus and are a clear sign that this is an issue that affects administration as well. However, the passes don’t seem to be very influential in solving the problem as these passes aren’t being given out 100% of the time.

This raises the question of why and how the buses are so late. Of course, this issue could easily be dismissed by saying that Alexandria is a busy city and traffic makes everybody late, but that still raises the question of why the buses weren’t this late last year and what could’ve changed to cause these delays.

This question was brought up to ACPS Pupil Transportation and Fleet Management director, MeChale Johnson, where she said, “We are still experiencing a staffing shortage due to the national bus driver shortage. As a result, we are having to complete double runs for some routes, which is impacting pickup and delivery times for students.”

The late arrival of buses is an issue that everyone at ACHS will be affected by. Going forward this school year, all that students and staff can do now is wait for administration or the transportation department to find a solid solution to this issue. It’s unclear whether the solution is to wait for more bus drivers or to improve current bus routes. But for now at least, both students and teachers are going to have to resort to temporary solutions such as the new passes or finding different transportation.