A Northside Independent School District mother says her son has waited more than two hours for a school bus this year, and the resulting absences have triggered warnings that she could be summoned to court. Brianne Armstrong says the ongoing delays have disrupted her son's education at his magnet school and left her questioning whether the district can deliver on the promise that drew her family there in the first place.
“He's waited over two hours,” Armstrong said, describing the wait times her son has faced trying to get to and from his magnet-school campus, according to KSAT. Her son has used the same bus route near home since ninth grade, but the delays and missed pickups have become a recurring problem this school year, she says, leading to attendance warnings tied directly to the late or absent buses.
Absence Notices Raise the Specter of Truancy Court
Armstrong says she has received notices marking her son absent four times, with warnings that she could face court proceedings over the accumulated absences — many of which she attributes to bus problems rather than skipped school. “My son is absent four times and you run the risk of having to go to court,” she said she was told. Texas law backs up the seriousness of those warnings: state guidance from the Texas Education Agency notes that an additional notice is required for certain absence thresholds, and that state education code lays out two options for enforcing compulsory attendance, with further truancy provisions found in the Texas Family Code.
Districts are also required to maintain accurate attendance records under a separate accounting system described by the Texas Education Agency, which oversees a statewide handbook governing how schools log and report student attendance data. Armstrong says she was told in late September that Northside ISD was working on fixing the bus-delay issue, but the problems have continued since then, according to the same report.
District Points to Traffic and a Driver Shortage
Northside ISD has confirmed bus delays in some areas, including West Side and Alamo Ranch routes, as well as on longer-distance routes that serve magnet schools, the district told the outlet. District officials said heavy traffic and staffing shortages are contributing factors, and said the district is currently short 42 bus drivers and 17 bus attendants.
Those numbers don't fully match figures the district has given in recent months. Back in September, Northside ISD told the San Antonio Express-News it needed 35 bus drivers, 40 bus assistants and 15 minibus drivers to be fully staffed. And in August, the district's own transportation director said more than 70 transportation positions were unfilled at the start of the school year. The district has not reconciled those differing counts.
Doubled Routes Have Lengthened Students' Commutes
The shortage has forced Northside ISD drivers to run double routes this year, stretching the time buses spend crisscrossing the district. The Express-News reported that the transportation department consolidated some routes just to make sure every student made it to school, a process that doubled each affected route's length and significantly increased the time students spend in transit, according to the district's transportation director. On a brighter note, the district has said new transportation hires could be behind the wheel within four to six weeks of being hired.
Northside isn't alone in the staffing crunch. The Express-News reported that San Antonio ISD had 16 bus-driver vacancies across roughly 125 routes, while Judson ISD needed 10 more drivers to reach full staffing. North East ISD, which operates more than 200 routes, said it needed 12 more drivers but touted a driver-retention rate near 80 percent — well above what the district described as a 50 percent industry norm.
The transportation strain isn't confined to San Antonio, either. In Houston, ISD's new bus-hub system built around magnet schools got off to what ABC13 described as a slow start, with major delays reported at multiple hubs. Students heading from the Pershing Middle School hub to Energy Institute High School waited about an hour and a half for a bus, and the district said its electronic driver sign-in system was down, forcing drivers to sign in manually before starting their routes.
A Mother Weighs Pulling Her Son From the Magnet Program
Armstrong says the unreliable bus-tracking app the district promotes hasn't helped her plan around the delays, telling KSAT it's often not updated or simply unreliable. Northside ISD's own website touts the free Here Comes the Bus app as a way for families to get real-time notifications and track their child's bus, but Armstrong says that hasn't been her family's experience.
She says she is now considering withdrawing her son from the magnet school altogether because of the ongoing transportation problems — a step that would undercut one of the district's own selling points. Under district policy, magnet-school students who need transportation must register separately for the service, since the regular bus-stop distance rules that apply to other Northside ISD students don't apply to magnet students, who are instead directed to get route information from their magnet campus. Armstrong says she questions the district's promotion of magnet schools as accessible from anywhere in the city when the transportation meant to get students there isn't reliable. She says she plans to contact the school board and her elected representative to push for a fix.
