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Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools

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Bus Transportation Updates:

(9/3/26)

This update is primarily for families who are experiencing issues with school bus transportation. It is a follow-up to our message from August 25:

Last Tuesday, we acknowledged the issues many families have experienced with being assigned school bus transportation for their student(s). While we’ve made tremendous progress since last week, the work is not yet complete. Here are the latest updates:

  • Our Transportation team has been working to assign school buses in response to requests submitted by last Thursday. 
  • We have added approximately 300 additional students to our morning routes, as well as our afternoon routes, since last Friday. 
  • Families whose students now have a bus have been informed by their school, or in the Infinite Campus parent portal.
  • We are continuing to work on a student-by-student basis until every eligible student has a bus.

If You Still Need a Bus

Last week, we provided instructions that involved checking Infinite Campus and contacting your school’s data manager. Moving forward, we can handle requests differently:

After Friday, Sept. 4 at 12:00 p.m., if your student still does not have a bus assignment (meaning you have not been contacted by your school or you do not see a bus assignment in Infinite Campus), two district staff members are dedicated to resolving the issue. Please email them directly:

Note: As more students are added to our bus lists, this may result in slight changes to the official bus stop times along certain routes (this is a common occurrence even when transportation systems operate normally.) If so, the time changes would appear in Infinite Campus. 

Lessons Learned

Tonight (Sept. 3), we will update the Board of Education and the public on how CHCCS will prevent this from happening in the future. This will include:

  • A much earlier spring/summer timeline to receive transportation requests and communicate bus routes, so that any issues are known and resolved several weeks prior to the start of school.
  • Partnering with state-level agencies to identify and implement better bus routing procedures.
  • Reorganizing staff responsibilities to strengthen operational capacity and improve our communication and level of customer service to you, our families.

Since last week, many families have done everything we’ve asked to help resolve these issues as quickly as possible. We sincerely apologize for the prolonged frustration and disruption. For everyone who has gone out of their way to help us serve your family, we say a sincere thank you.

We will continue to update the district as we address these issues and make the necessary systemic changes for next year.

Sincerely,

Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools

(8/25/26)

I’m writing to acknowledge the frustration and lack of information that many of our families have experienced leading up to, and during, this first week of school in our district. These issues include newly enforced walk zones, missing bus assignments, and perhaps most frustrating of all, the absence of timely or repeated updates about these situations. On behalf of CHCCS, I apologize. This should be an exciting and welcoming start to the school year, and for some of our families, we’ve failed to create that environment.

What’s Happening

We’ve discovered a number of technical or communication issues that we must improve, both immediately and in the long-term. While the issues aren't fully resolved yet, I want you to know we are working as hard as we can to fix them as soon as possible. Here’s what we know, and what we’re doing:

  • Some students at the elementary level, (as well as some students who rose into Kindergarten, 6th or 9th grade) were inadvertently unassigned from bus transportation. A similar issue is also impacting some students who receive Exceptional Children’s services. This is a technical issue that we may need your help to fix (more on this below.) 
  • In a different issue, we did not properly inform all impacted families in our existing walk zones that these would be fully enforced starting this school year. Information about walk zones did not reach all impacted families, particularly new families who may have moved into a walk zone. We also did not send additional reminders, which is not consistent with our standard for communicating changes to families and students.
  • For those families who did receive bus information, the late notification (Friday, August 21), resulted from another technical issue that we’ve since identified and expect to be resolved for the future.

These are challenges that we can fix - and we are taking the necessary steps to do that with urgency. The good news is that we have the drivers and buses to cover all of our routes. 

What Should You Do If You Are Impacted by One of These Issues

In the short-term, if you live outside of a walk zone and still don’t have a bus assignment or are unsure about it, here’s what we recommend: 

  • First, check the Infinite Campus Parent Portal. (Here are instructions for setting this up if necessary.)
  • Find the Menu (three horizontal lines near the top) and then tap “More”.
  • Then, tap “Transportation”.
  • There, you will be able to see if a bus route is assigned or not assigned to your student.
  • If you submitted a request for transportation and do not see an assignment in Infinite Campus, first contact your school’s Data Manager (emails are here for each school) to confirm your request was received.

Please know that while we are working as quickly as possible, it may still take several days to assign your student their bus. If student information is correct in Infinite Campus by this Thursday, August 27, then a bus assignment should be available in Infinite Campus no later than the afternoon of Thursday, September 3. This is because while adding a student to a route is a simple process, doing so may then trigger impacts to other stops or routes, which may require additional time to coordinate and communicate to drivers and families.

Getting students to school safely and on time every day is one of our core services. Again, I am very sorry for these situations, and we will get them fixed.

Sincerely,

Rodney N. Trice, Ed. D.

Superintendent