готэмист | As the city approaches the end of the school year, Gothamist crunched the data on nine months of school bus delays. The results are mixed.

While the city’s public school buses are on pace to have fewer overall delays compared to the previous school year, the extreme delays that Izquierdo says her kids experience — those exceeding an hour — are at their highest point since the city started collecting the data in 2015.

And most of those long delays are affecting buses transporting students with disabilities. Parents and advocates say the failure to get those children to school on time violates their rights to an education.

“Students with disabilities have a right to fully participate in school and be present in all classes,” said Randi Levine, the policy director for Advocates for Children. “So it is a legal problem if students are arriving late every day and missing class.”

Here’s how the numbers break down:

New York City’s public school buses serve more than 150,000 students across more than 9,000 bus routes, according to the city’s Department of Education. Departmental data shows those buses have experienced 65,811 delays so far, and there’s just less than a month left to go. That’s 17% fewer overall delays than last year. But nearly a third of them — 19,996 bus rides in total — exceeded one hour. That’s 39% higher than last year.

Students with disabilities were more likely to experience longer bus rides. In the 2024-25 school year, special education buses made up 74% of the overall delays. That’s consistent with the fact that three-quarters of all school buses in the city serve children with disabilities, according to the Department of Education. But that doesn’t account for another stark number in the data: 94% of the delays that went over an hour affected those very same special education buses.

City Councilmember Rita Joseph, who chairs the education committee, said she is aware of the persistent crisis and the array of challenges facing students with disabilities who rely on school buses. In response to Gothamist’s findings, she said she’ll request a briefing from the Department of Education to better understand the trend in delays.

Joseph has joined parents and advocates who have said the problem stems from a bus driver shortage perpetuated by an outdated contract between the city and the school bus companies. The 45-year-old contract is regularly being renewed after the city interpreted a 2011 state Court of Appeals decision to mean that it could not enter into new contracts without eliminating employee protections, which include job security for drivers whose companies go out of business and seniority preference for new bus routes.

“If these contracts get extended we can’t add any new companies, so we can’t address the shortage,” Izquierdo said. “That’s crazy.”