School-bus snafu takes kids for ride

Seattle Public Schools is blaming a software glitch for 900 incorrect student bus schedules during the first weeks of school.

The snafu flooded the district's phone lines, leaving frustrated parents listening to busy signals and employees working through weekends to manually correct the mistakes.

Officials say they don't know how many students rode the wrong routes or missed their stops. They say they've worked out the schedules, but the software still has kinks that need to be resolved.

Nearly 30,000 of the district's 45,000 students are eligible for transportation services. Almost all of those ride yellow buses. Lauren Heyne's 9-year-old son, Quin, is one of them.

The bus has dropped off Quin a half-block from Heyne's Beacon Hill home for three years. But this year, Quin had to persuade the driver to let him off near home instead of dropping him off several blocks away and across a major street, as the district's transportation system had instructed.

For children at the elementary-school level, drivers must make sure they are dropped off at the stop identified on the bus roster.

"If she had dropped him off there, I would never have known it, because he would have been three blocks away," Heyne said.

Sharla Fischburg considers it lucky her 6-year-old great-grandson didn't end up home alone the first day of school.

She said she had arranged for the district to drop him off at Sanislo Elementary for an after-school program, but instead the first-grader showed up at home, where his dad happened to be because he'd gotten off work early.

"I think the worst part of it was that kids who are starting school need to have bus service," she said. "If they have to take a bus to school, then it needs to be done and it needs to be done in a timely manner."

The district's new, $171,000 computer system is programmed to automatically mail notices to parents when their children's bus schedules change, said Dave Anderson, transportation manager.

But the system developed a snag when parents called to make minor changes — to have their child dropped off at a day-care site instead of home, for example. The system changed that child's schedule — but also changed others and sent notices to the other families informing them of changes that should never have been made.

District employees didn't realize what had happened until the second day of school. By then, the calls had overwhelmed the phone lines.

The district returned to a manual system and called every parent affected to tell them their child's correct assignment, Anderson said. Employees have worked every weekend this month to fix the mistakes, he said.

Lauren Heyne's sister, Michelle Heyne, resorted to putting her 10-year-old son, headed for Alternative School No. 1 near Northgate, on a Metro bus after the district scheduled him to be picked up in Ballard, even though he lives in Green Lake.

She said she spent hours pressing redial on her phone when she got only a busy signal at the district. "There's been lots of phoning and lots of leaving work early and getting to work late," she said.

As for her son, who's still taking Metro to school, she said, "He's been pretty brave about it."

Emily Heffter: 206-464-8246 or eheffter@seattletimes.com