Overview
- The district’s new Chipmunk routing and tracking app crashed Tuesday, leaving roughly 10,000 students without permanent bus assignments and causing missed pickups and long delays.
- Superintendent Shawn Joseph called the rollout a “leadership failure,” apologized, and pledged around‑the‑clock work to assign students and fix routes by Saturday.
- PGCPS said it has added four routing technicians, an extra scheduler and a routing supervisor, but warned that full stabilization and corrections to ride times will take two to three weeks.
- Driver shortages — the district reported about 41 vacancies out of roughly 1,100 drivers — forced some routes to be combined, which lengthened rides for specialty‑program students to nearly two hours in some cases.
- Officials ordered a cross‑department operations audit of transportation, finance, technology and customer service, told families to use Chipmunk or BusPlanner for temporary tracking, and urged parents not to put children on unauthorized buses while routes are corrected.