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In March of last year, John H. Summers, a Cambridge parent whose son has autism, filed a complaint against Cambridge Public Schools about disability-based discrimination in transportation. After a year, the district has taken steps to improve, but Summers says there is still a long way to go.
Summers’ son is one of the many disabled students in Cambridge who take alternative transportation to school. In his complaint with the United States Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, Summers alleged that the lack of tracking capabilities on the vehicles — as compared to other buses in the district — constitutes disability-based discrimination.
“Put yourselves in the shoes of the parent who has a nonverbal autistic child like myself who doesn’t know when the child is getting or where the child is,” Summers said in an interview with The Crimson.
Following Summers’ complaint, the School Committee instructed NRT Busing, which supplies the vehicles that transport disabled students, to work with the district to install tracking devices in all the vehicles. The School Committee approved a 33 million dollar contract with the company in June, contingent on the installation.
But Summers said at a Thursday meeting of the Special Education & Student Supports Subcommittee that the district has still fallen short of providing adequate tracking services.
At the meeting, Interim Chief Operations Officer Damon Smith said the district has piloted a tracking app that has received “positive feedback” from families.
“It does provide more information to families about locations and where the buses are,” he said. “I recognize that even though it is a better product and it’s improved from what it was before, there are still some desires and some hopes in the functionality of the program that haven't been realized just yet.”
“But in terms of what it was in the fall to where it is now in the spring, I would say, significantly better,” he added.
Summers, who was one of the families in the pilot program, said he is “glad that there’s movement” on the issue. But he added he does not believe the app will “get the transportation system where it needs to be.”
“This is not real time tracking,” Summers said during public comment. “What was presented as radius tracking is just simply, you open the app, it gives you a kind of segment that gets colored in when the van is approaching, doesn’t tell you how long it’s going to be until it gets there, and then it doesn’t track the van or the bus when it leaves.”
“I don’t even use it. I find it pretty much useless for the reasons that I filed a complaint in the first place,” he added.
Smith clarified that parents are able to set radius notifications on the current app. But he conceded that radius tracking is just one step in improving transportation and committed to continue working toward real-time tracking.
“We are better than what we were before, but still not meeting that particular demand and need that I think he is advocating for, and I do want that to be the case for all of our students,” Smith said.
School Committee member Elizabeth C.P. Hudson said that given the number of issues the district faces that are “totally outside our control,” transportation should be an easier problem to fix.
“There can be construction, there can be accidents, but certainly — I think we could agree — a much bigger proportion of this problem is totally under our control,” she said. "And it still doesn’t seem to go smoothly. We don’t seem to be proactive about it.”
In an interview with the Crimson, Summers said that the district needs to put more focus on solving this issue.
“It's not a technological issue. It’s a financial and political issue,” Summers said. “Until they start acknowledging that frankly and dealing with it on those terms, I don't see a whole lot of improvement.”
—Staff writer Ayaan Ahmad can be reached at ayaan.ahmad@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @AyaanAhmad2024.
—Staff writer Claire A. Michal can be reached at claire.michal@thecrimson.com.
