Boston Public Schools students who only occasionally ride the school bus will soon lose access to the service. District leaders plan to cancel rides for those kids starting in May as part of a larger effort to build more efficiency and cost-savings into the massive school transportation system.
The move is expected to save the district roughly $3 to $5 million per year, according to a transportation progress report released Wednesday.
“This change will further improve reliability and on-time performance, while ensuring resources are allocated equitably and efficiently to the students who rely on the school bus to get to and from school,” BPS officials wrote in the report.
The district said it has already communicated with families to voluntarily remove about 1,000 students from bus service, out of a total estimated ridership of 22,000. The district estimates the trims will cut about 400 stops from daily routes. After spring break the week of April 22, the district will automatically opt students out of bus service if they don’t ride the bus for 10 consecutive school days.
Those students will lose their bus assignments. District officials say they’ve identified more than 2,000 students “as consistently not riding their assigned bus this school year.” At the start of the school year, the district phased in a new GPS navigation technology and tracking app that has allowed BPS to track student ridership.
Families who have lost bus service due to the new plan will have three business days to notify the district that their child will return to riding the bus. Students can also reinstate transportation services at any time as long as they’re still eligible.
The opt-out process was developed and unanimously recommended by BPS’s Transportation Advisory Council.
“We know that right now the system is over capacity,” Dan Rosengard, BPS director of transportation, said during a public roundtable conversation hosted by Mayor Michelle Wu and Superintendent Mary Skipper on Wednesday. “We need to make sure that every student has a high quality seat close to home and that will help to right size the transportation system so we can get the rest of the way there.”
School bus transportation cost the district about $180 million in fiscal year 2025. That amount is projected to rise to about $188 million next fiscal year, or 12% of the total operating budget. District officials say there’s a need to build more efficiency into transportation services because the system continues to grow more complex each year for multiple reasons.
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Over the past decade, according to the report, the total number of bus stops has grown due to an increase in students attending Boston-area charter schools, which are served by BPS buses; the amount of families who are choosing schools that are farther from their homes; and the number of students with special needs who require special services like door-to-door bus service.
Boston’s school bus system has been under the microscope since 2022 when state education leaders cited low on-time school bus arrival rates in a wide-ranging school improvement plan. The state required the district ensure that 95% of school buses arrive at school on time each day. As of March 2025, the transportation system averaged about a 94% one-time arrival rate.
“This represents the highest monthly on-time performance recorded at any time in the last five years,” the report stated.
In addition to student rider opt-outs, the district will continue to rely on new transportation software to track student ridership and bus performance and traffic data. The transportation department is also working with non-BPS school leaders from parochial, charter and private schools to adjust school start times to allow for more efficient routing.
“We are excited to take that on and do better each and every day,” Wu said at Wednesday’s event. “To make sure Boston continues to make progress and that this oldest school district in the country is going to be the best.”
Read the full report here.
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