Chair Lee on transportation route efficiencies

And the FY27 budget includes 27.9 million reduction, which grows to 55.9 million in the out years due to transportation route efficiencies.

How is DOE planning to optimize transportation routes without disrupting service?

And which the council is constantly fighting to improve.

This came up in the last hearing as well.

So thank you for this question.

When I think about our bus routes and our bus contracts, we have obviously decades-old contracts, as the chair talked about.

We have over 9,000 routes that we do every day for 150,000 students.

This is something that I've learned.

Probably the most about this topic since becoming chancellor and you know thinking about the modernization that we need to do how we make our book our

our roots actually more efficient i'm going to turn it over to deputy chancellor kevin moran to speak a little bit more about that good afternoon everyone um

I want to thank you very much for that question.

It was the modernization began here in this chamber in 2018 with a series of local laws.

In 2019, it was local law 32, 33, and 34.

mandating GPS and other pieces of information that were not, one, transparent and where we couldn't see accountabilities.

So over the past many years, we implemented this modernization effort, one of which is actually having people log in every day when they drive the bus.

That's up to 95%.

So I want to thank our drivers across all our companies for logging in, whereas parents can see now in their New York City school bus app.

Where their children are at any given time.

And 900 bus routes this school year started what's known as ridership tracking, where students can actually badge on the yellow school bus and badge off, and there's where we can determine time traveled.

What happens now this fall is we start our routing optimization, all predicated on our Strides program, which is

our modernization program that took all 39 legacy systems and put them into one system so we can actually do something with the data that we're collecting that wasn't spread across disparate systems.

So now, for this September, we're actually going to run for all of our, what you call, curb to school.

Which is door-to-door busing, where our students are going to get this new routing system.

It's our first modern effort to do the routing.

What that'll do is allow us to reduce routes and travel times.

Our students with IEPs are traveling 137% more time to get to school than their gen ed peers.

And so what we want the routing algorithms to do is to reduce time travel, find efficiencies.

But I think it's important to realize

our standard operating

procedures maybe not being adhered to at the school level that relates to this specific issue, whereas by default, a student with transportation on their IEP is defaulted into the

smaller type bus settings rather than being exposed to a continuum of least restrictive environments.

And so students could get on a smaller bus at age four and graduate high school at 22 years old in the same small passenger bus.

So what this effort is to do is introduce

where appropriate and where comfortable, a less restrictive environment within traveling.

So that is ultimately cheaper.

We do anticipate cost savings.

And ultimately, we believe it's the right thing to do.

Great.

Thank you.

I have a bunch of questions on 2K, 3K, which I'm going to forego because I have a feeling a lot of my colleagues are going to ask about 3K, 2K programming.

So I will play cleanup at the end if there's any other questions that haven't been asked.

But I do want to just mention that it would be great if we could.

As you mentioned, Chancellor, Deputy Chancellor, sorry, Deputy Chancellor, the pay parity across all the different systems.

And I also have a bill in the council about that versus the school-based and the CBO-based 3K program.

So whatever we can do to bring it as close to.

Similar as possible would be great.