Thousands of NYC Special Needs Students Start School Year Without Bus Service

New York City's public school system opened this fall with roughly 2,000 students, the overwhelming majority of them children with disabilities, lacking assigned bus service on day one, according to the advocacy group Advocates for Children of New York.

Nearly 200 yellow bus routes faced delays or outright cancellations as classes began this month, with the city's Department of Education notifying affected families directly and offering prepaid rideshare vouchers as a stopgap while it works to fill the gaps. Roughly 150,000 New York City students rely on the yellow bus system citywide, a system that costs the city close to two billion dollars a year to run, making even a shortfall affecting a few thousand students a logistical strain for the families caught in it.

Advocates say the rideshare fix falls well short of solving the problem, because it requires an adult to accompany the child on every ride, effectively forcing working parents to choose between a paycheck and getting their child to school on time. "Without bus service, students may need to miss school," a representative for the advocacy group said, calling on the city to explore every available option to get the affected students into classrooms without further delay.

The disruption is the latest in a string of busing failures that have disproportionately hit the city's special education population in recent years. City Council data has found that the vast majority of reported bus delays, about 75 percent, involve special education students, many of whom depend on consistent routines and door-to-door service that public transit cannot easily replicate. Parents and advocates have pushed the Department of Education for years to overhaul how it tracks and reports delays, including a pilot program allowing students to scan on and off buses to generate more reliable data.

The Department of Education has not said when full route coverage will be restored, leaving families to scramble through the opening weeks of the school year under Mayor Zohran Mamdani's administration as the city works to plug a busing system that has struggled with reliability for the better part of a decade.