ALEXANDRIA, Va. — Alexandria City Public Schools officials told the School Board on Thursday that the team that worked with the city to set this year's walk zones did not include educators who could judge what young children can safely handle.
"We had operations staff, we had city staff, but we didn't have educators who are developmentally aware of, can a 5-year-old walk to school? Can a 7-year-old? Can a 12-year-old?" said Marcia Jackson, the division's chief of student services and equity, who described it as what she would have done differently. She also noted that the chief operating officer's job was vacant at the time.
Acting Superintendent Grace Taylor said staff and the city "did their very, very best" on a tight timeline with only a couple of people at the table, and called it "a huge lesson learned."
The acknowledgment came after five parents and community members used the public comment period to ask the board, again, to restore bus service for children in Arlandria-Chirilagua who attend Mount Vernon Community School. Staff said final decisions on bus service requests, including appeals from families who live inside a walk zone but say the route is unsafe, will be communicated on or before Sept. 30. Staff did not say Thursday whether bus service would return to the neighborhood.
"I hope you're hearing the acknowledgment that we did not get it right," board member Kelly Carmichael Booz said, addressing families who might be watching. "But this team is working really hard to get things right."
'A mile is a measure of distance'
Evan Wilson, who told the board he has served as a PTA president, said he and others began raising concerns about the loss of bus service between Arlandria-Chirilagua and Mount Vernon Community School two weeks before school started.
"We are now almost 3 weeks into school and there is still no solution," Wilson said. He described seeing a small child riding on the back of a moped down Mount Vernon Avenue on the way to school Wednesday, and said some children face a walk of more than a mile that includes crossing West Glebe Road. He said a juvenile pedestrian was struck Aug. 31 at Mount Vernon Avenue and Russell Road, a few blocks away.
"A mile is a measure of distance. It's not a measure of safety," he said, adding that ACPS has run double bus routes before and that some buses, including his own children's, are running under capacity.
Adriana Gomez Schellhaas, a Mount Vernon parent who lives in the neighborhood, said children on Executive Avenue and Russell Road have been without a bus since the first day of school, and that she has heard from neighbors whose children have not attended school at all. She said the division's transportation request form is available only in English, so she has been helping Spanish-speaking parents fill it out. At the board's Aug. 27 meeting, Tim Mullins said the form requires families to acknowledge that their child is not eligible for transportation, the very point they are disputing.
"Parents are frustrated and tired. Children are not attending school. We need these buses back," she said. She thanked board members Michelle Rief and Tim Beaty for joining her on a walk from Executive Avenue to the school last week.
Two mothers spoke through a Spanish interpreter. Haydee Galdamez said she has three daughters at three different schools, is not working and is paying out of pocket to get them there. Lucia Vicente, a mother of four, said she has no car and pays $5 each way for a ride to pick up her children, which she estimated costs about $200 a month.
Victoria Chang, a Mount Vernon parent who raised the issue two weeks ago, said it had not been resolved. She acknowledged the division's budget limits and driver shortage, but said, "equity means allocating resources where the risk is highest and options are lowest."
'Complexity cannot substitute for accountability'
Taylor opened her superintendent's report with transportation, calling it one of the most significant concerns the division has heard from the community this year.
She cited new boundaries, new walk zones and eligibility changes arriving at the same time as a new transportation information system and a driver shortage. Rief noted that nearly 1,200 new students also registered after July 1, all of whom had to be added to routes.
"This has been a particularly complex start to the school year, one that I've never personally experienced, professionally experienced," Taylor said. "With that said, complexity cannot substitute for accountability."
She said ACPS has received more than 1,000 transportation-related inquiries and is addressing each one individually. A slide in the staff presentation said transportation operations "are directly impacting attendance, classroom schedules, and division-wide morale."
The presentation was the division's most detailed public account of the problems so far. At the Aug. 27 meeting, the division's written opening-of-schools report gave transportation a single slide that did not mention late buses or students who lost eligibility, and Simpson Baird asked that updates be shared publicly rather than only by email to board members.
Chief Operating Officer Anthony Peña said Thursday that the majority of students have been routed. In a post on the School Board's website last week, the members of the board's Strategy and Accountability Committee wrote that staff reported on Aug. 31 that about 97% of eligible students had been assigned to routes. Jackson said most of the requests now under review come from families who live inside a walk zone but say their route is unsafe.
'A real reset'
Board members pressed staff on how the division arrived at this year's walk zones. Under division policy, students in kindergarten through eighth grade who live within a mile of school are generally expected to walk.
Beaty said a report the board received in the spring showed many more students would walk this year, and that he was told the change reflected city street safety improvements, not only redistricting. At Charles Barrett Elementary, he said, attendance zones barely changed, yet he believed more than 100 students who rode a bus last year no longer do. He described blocks with no sidewalks on either side and parked cars lining both curbs. ACPS has not said how many students across the division lost bus eligibility under the new walk zones.
"There is no place else for the kids to walk except on the street," Beaty said. He asked whether staff had consulted the list of past safety exceptions that had put buses in those neighborhoods before.
Jackson said most staff who handled the 2018 redistricting are no longer with the division and record-keeping "wasn't as strong as it needed to be." She said capacity reassignments and other changes over the years had meant the policy was not always applied as written.
"This has been a real reset for us overall as a school division," she said. "We have said, okay, we are going to follow the policy as it is written. We will certainly reconsider any hazards."
The division's transportation page describes safety exceptions as making addresses only "temporarily eligible" for bus service, subject to later review, which is why exceptions granted in past years did not carry over.
Taylor told the board Aug. 27 that some walk zone information, including maps in the attendance zone locator, had required correction. The committee's three members — Reyna, Booz and Rief — wrote in last week's post that walk zone distances had not changed in policy, but that an initial error in the division's walk zone locator had confused some families about how the one-mile and 1.5-mile standards applied.
No standard yet for 'unsafe'
Several board members asked how staff will decide whether a route is too dangerous to walk. Chair Christopher Harris noted that safety can be subjective and asked what standard the division would apply across all schools.
Peña, who joined the division last month, said staff are still developing that framework and expect to refine it next week after meeting with city partners. He said staff have finished categorizing the walk zone appeals and visited several locations themselves, flagging intersections of concern for the city, which he said has committed to traffic studies at some of them.
At the Aug. 27 meeting, Jeremy Miller, a Douglas MacArthur Elementary School parent, read the board what he said was the city's response to his public records request: that the city did not analyze routes for each student's address, and that the walk zone analysis was done with GIS at the school and geographic-area level. The Brief has not independently reviewed that response.
Board member Ashley Simpson Baird asked why the city had a role in what she understood to be an ACPS decision. Peña said the city is a partner that can provide data such as crash information, but "ultimately, we'll make the decisions, ACPS."
The committee's post last week put more of that responsibility on the city, stating that city staff "is responsible for designating hazardous intersections based on updated assessments of safety improvements." Neither account spelled out who has the final say on whether a crossing is safe enough for a young child to use.
Board member Ryan Reyna urged staff to prioritize intersections the city has already identified for future safety upgrades, naming Sanger Avenue and Beauregard Street, Mount Vernon Avenue and Glebe Road, and Quaker Lane and Janneys Lane. Taylor said those were the same intersections staff discussed with the city in early August.
Booz noted that planned improvements at Glebe and Mount Vernon are not expected until 2027 and asked what the division is doing in the meantime. Jackson said the city has told ACPS that additional crossing guards are not budgeted, but that existing guards could be moved to areas of concern. Taylor said she is in weekly contact with the police chief, and that police have committed to help when staffing allows, but that no crossing guards have been shifted yet. The committee's post said staff had confirmed that current conditions, not only planned improvements, will be considered as walk routes are reviewed.
Drivers and monitors
Peña said the division is down to 16 bus driver vacancies from the 18 listed in the presentation, and that he hopes to cut that number in half by next week. Vice Chair Alexander Crider Scioscia said the division has historically carried between eight and 11 vacancies.
He said bus monitors will start next week. His goal is to have new drivers on routes by mid-October. The committee's post, summarizing what staff told members Aug. 31, said ACPS planned to hire and onboard new drivers by the end of September.
The division's human resources chief cautioned the board that newly hired drivers must complete training before they are assigned a route, so the public may not see vacancies fall for several weeks.
Peña said the division is running double routes where it can, but that call-outs and shortages make that difficult. He said he did not want to promise a bus the division could not staff, "because then it's going to let the community down."
The committee's post confirmed Wilson's point that buses are not running full. Under division regulation, though, a student who is not eligible for transportation can get a seat only if space is available on an existing route at an existing stop. ACPS will not add a stop or change a route for those requests, and eligible students keep priority. A 2025 study of the ACPS transportation system by the TransPar Group found the fleet operating at less than 60% of capacity.
Peña said a team pulled into one room cleared hundreds of cases last week, prioritizing students in special education, students with Section 504 plans and students experiencing homelessness. He asked families who have already submitted a request not to call or email again, saying each repeat contact pulls staff away from routing.
Attendance
Rief asked whether schools are reaching out to families whose children have missed school because of transportation. Jackson said chronic absenteeism was about 14% the last time she checked, which she described as typical for this time of year, compared with a goal of about 10%. She said transportation-related absences are being coded as such. The committee's post said students will not be penalized for transportation-related tardiness while the division works through the problems.
Staff said the division's 10-day withdrawal date passed Tuesday and that the enrollment team has not yet reviewed who was dropped. Reyna asked whether families whose children missed school because of transportation would get a grace period. Jackson said those cases would be handled individually.
At the Aug. 27 meeting, Marisela Serrano, who lives on Executive Avenue, told the board her 6-year-old son, who has an Individualized Education Program, had not been to school since his bus stopped coming. Staff did not say Thursday how many students have missed school for the same reason.
What's next
Staff said they will meet with city officials Monday and expect to send families rolling responses on walk zone appeals, with all decisions by Sept. 30. Peña said a performance update on transportation, including on-time data, will follow that date. The committee's post said ACPS will also conduct an after-action review of transportation and walk zone implementation after September.
Jackson acknowledged that some families will not be satisfied with the outcome. Families "may disagree with what standards we set, and that is always a parent's right," she said, adding that the division would still work with them on other ways to get their children to school.
At the end of the meeting, the board went into closed session to discuss, among other items, the performance of specific employees in the Office of Pupil Transportation and Fleet Management.
Ryan Belmore is an Alexandria resident and the founder and publisher of The Alexandria Brief. Send tips, feedback, and story ideas to ryan@alexandriabrief.com.
