Two days before Zum’s roughly 200 brand-new buses would file out of their Jessup bus yard and pick up thousands of Howard County students for the first time, the transportation company was caught off guard — school system leaders had changed some of the bus routes, and some of them contained errors.

Some routes that previously called for buses now needed vans. Some of the routes listed zero kids for pickup. And their new drivers, many unfamiliar with the area, wouldn’t have a chance to do a test run of the revised routes.

“What a disaster,” wrote one Zum executive in an email that Saturday morning.

Correspondence between the Howard County Public School System and its largest bus contractor, obtained by The Baltimore Banner in a public records request, sheds new light on the missteps that led to a chaotic start to the school year, when 2,400 students were left without a ride to school and many more arrived home hours after the last bell.

Zum, the California-based startup with a $27 million contract to operate nearly half the school system’s bus routes, knew in early August there wouldn’t be enough local bus drivers for the first day of school, the correspondence shows. Emails also show that school system staff fumbled the handoff of finalized routes to Zum, forcing company executives and school officials to work all night trying to mitigate the crisis.

Three months later, school officials are tepidly celebrating that their transportation woes are mostly behind them. And while many Howard County parents are relieved to feel they can depend on the school bus again, others say the school system has a long way to go to earn back their trust.

The story continues at The Baltimore Banner: Inside Howard County’s school bus crisis: Everything that went wrong before Zum’s launch

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