CommonWealth Beacon, September 2024
The first days of school this year in Boston have had little in common with the violence-wracked start to the school year 50 years ago. Except in one respect: The city’s fleet of yellow school buses continue to figure prominently in the headlines. In 1974, Boston landed in the national, and even international, news with scenes of buses carrying Black students to South Boston High School being pelted with rocks. The violent and vitriolic reaction to the implementation of a federal court order to desegregate the city’s schools marked Boston as the most racist northern US city. Two generations later, the city is still struggling to shed the reputation those days seared into the minds of many.
Last week, the busing problems were of a decidedly more prosaic nature. After a big build-up of expectations by city leaders that they had smoothed out problems with late arriving buses that often mar the start of the school year, Day 1 of the new and improved bus plan was a bust. Roughly two-thirds of buses were late on the first day, the worst performance in nine years. Bus performance will undoubtedly get better as drivers settle into their routines, though whether the city will hit the 95 percent on-time benchmark set by a state improvement plan is unclear.
