Howard county school bus salary12/18/2023 In reality, the Board relies on the Superintendent and his Central Office staff to serve as trusted expert advisors who provide accurate and timely information, analysis, and recommendations on operational issues such as the current issue of transportation. Superintendent Martirano and his team don’t just take orders from the Board of Education and blindly execute them. All major HCPSS initiatives go through him and oftentimes either start with or end up being heavily influenced by him. None of this has occurred without Superintendent Martirano’s blessing. a less than 10 year old California-based company that has only recently begun providing bus services to a handful of West Coast school districts - for an $81 million three-year contract to service half of HCPSS bus routes despite HCPSS already being locked in to existing contracts with local bus companies for the majority of their 400+ routes through 2027. It was Superintendent Martirano’s Transportation Department that cooly convinced the Board that it was in the best interest of HCPSS students, families and Howard County taxpayers to sign Zum Services, Inc. (Note: you may need to copy the above BoardDocs link directly into your browser for it to work properly, if you receive an error by clicking on it.) It was Superintendent Martirano’s Transportation Department that then came back to the Board months later and insisted that expanding walker zones and removing bus service for 3500+ HCPSS students was not only necessary to implement school start time changes, but would be a brilliant means of “maximizing efficiency”. It was Superintendent Martirano’s Transportation Department that convinced the Board that school start time changes could be implemented smoothly, with minimal impact to students and families. In a sad twist of irony for a school system whose Strategic Call To Action is “Learning and Leading with Equity”, those who suffered the worst from this situation have been the many special needs students who depend so strongly on routine and safe, timely transportation and the thousands o f students from families with fewer resources who were unable to be driven to school on-time (or at all) or picked up at the end of the school day.Īt approximately 11:00 PM on Augthe night before the second day of school - HCPSS families were notified that bus routes for thousands of students would be canceled for at least the full first week of school:įor years, Superintendent Martirano has used the Board of Education as a shield to avoid real accountability for situations and crises that can primarily be attributed to his leadership, going so far as to even use some of crises and leadership failures to apply for personal awards, such as the “Leaders to Learn From” award for his 2019 redistricting plan that shook outraged and disrupted the lives of thousands of HCPSS families. Fast forward to late August 2023… despite getting their contract commitment at the time insisted upon over 7 months prior, Zum Services has been caught completely flat-footed and short-staffed in Howard County, flying in temporary drivers from across the country (as far as the West Coast), canceling bus routes until at least the end of this first school week, and leaving thousands of families with bus ride horror stories including multiple hours late pickups & dropoffs for hundreds of bus routes, countless incidents of “no-show” and “drive-by-with-no-pickup” routes, wrongful and abrupt dropoffs of elementary school students in unsafe and unfamiliar areas, wrong maps and broken GPS systems, and even mass car sickness and bloody noses as “a bus driver got lost and drove erratically in circles until the kids were literally sick”.
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