Look Back to Move Forward on Transportation & Integration
Click Here for the Village Green Article and full context to Mr. Alves’ expertise.
*Variance within the III is the allowed percentage deviation from the district's average socioeconomic status (SES) in each school's student population. A smaller variance means a more integrated school system; a larger variance means a more segregated one. SOMSD has always used a +/- 5% variance for the Intentional Integration Initiative.
Listening, Learning, and Leading After October 14th’s Community Event
At the Community Event on October 14th, there were 2 bus routes left unsolved. One parent representative from Tuxedo park shared this frustration AND a potential solution! This is the kind of dialogue we want to foster as we continue to meet the societal and academic challenges we have faced for decades and continue to face especially when national leadership is seeking to divide its citizens.
We also thought it would be helpful to ground the ongoing discussion around the III in data, history, and context. Transportation and triple III are related (because everything in a school District is related), but they are not each other’s eternal cause and effect.
At Superintendent Bing’s recent Community Conversations and the Village Green’s interviews with integration consultant Michael Alves, the District’s focus on balancing proximity, equity, and fiscal responsibility is important — and we recognize that transportation and budget pressures are real challenges for our district.
When we listen, we hear the same things the district does — that long bus rides, early mornings, and rising costs are taking a toll. We also hear that families believe in the promise of integration: schools that reflect the diversity and shared values of our community.
We agree that any integration plan must be truly intentional AND have developed real solutions to address the core transportation challenges that have caused us all so much frustration.
We must identify the real problems, gather the data, and then determine whether proposed changes will truly solve it.
We’ve heard others say that our approach sounds like “wait and see.” But what we’re really calling for is the full data and analysis before drawing conclusions without that full data — it’s what being data-driven actually looks like in practice.
Thoughtful governance means evaluating all the variables together, not selecting or cherrypicking data — so we can provide meaningful solutions.
It’s important to look back in order to look ahead. Understanding where issues originated helps us ensure we are analyzing them accurately today. In this case, reviewing the district’s long-standing transportation challenges is essential to untangling them from the Intentional Integration Initiative (III).
Only by separating historical transportation issues from those introduced by III can we make targeted, effective improvements. As we consider potential modifications to III, it’s critical that we evaluate data across all overlapping factors — transportation, zoning, and placement — to isolate the right areas for focused improvement and ensure that changes are addressing the actual problems.
Transportation Challenges: A Longstanding Problem, Not an Intentional Integration Initiative Problem
The Intentional Integration Initiative (III) is designed to undo long-standing racial and socioeconomic segregation, advance equity for every student, and build a diverse, balanced school community that reflects our two towns. True integration not only strengthens academic opportunity — it reduces bias, fosters empathy, and prepares all children to thrive in a diverse world. III is a living expression of SOMA’s core values of inclusion, fairness, and shared community.
Transportation issues in SOMSD didn’t start with the Intentional Integration Initiative (III). Long before III, we faced inconsistent and limited courtesy busing, operational inefficiencies, and rising costs — transportation spending rose 10% in the 2020–2021 budget, reaching nearly $7 million.
The Intentional Integration Initiative (III) launched in the 2021–2022 school year with the integration of Kindergarten classes.
Earlier that same year, in April 2021, the Board of Education voted to end “courtesy busing” for students living within two miles of school, citing equity and financial pressures. Soon after, a group of parents filed a lawsuit challenging the termination of long-standing courtesy and hazardous busing services that predated III. The lawsuit was settled, providing restored courtesy busing for a small number of pre-III students.
By the 2022–2023 school year, the District had fully outsourced transportation, leading to widespread bus delays and missed stops. In 2023–2024, the District instituted courtesy busing for students living more than 1.25 miles from school — at an added cost of $1.5 million to taxpayers. Despite additional funding, transportation problems persisted in 2024-2025 and into the start of the 2025–2026 school year.
Today, transportation costs have ballooned to $10.5 million in the 2025–2026 budget — a nearly 50% increase since before III. But that jump is driven not by III itself, but by outsourcing and the equitable implementation of the 1.25-mile courtesy busing policy, both of which require more buses and drivers.
A Closer Look at the Data
It’s understandable that families frustrated with late buses or long routes look to the integration plan for answers. But as the district’s own consultant, Michael Alves, recently shared, transportation challenges are not a byproduct of integration parameters — and increasing the variance won’t solve them.
In a recent Village Green interview, Alves stated, “The real issue here is what is the root cause of people still upset about transportation? That’s really more important, because it’s not the variance.” He also reported that expanding the socioeconomic variance from ±5 % to ±10 % had a minimal effect on proximity — only increasing the share of kindergarteners attending their closest school from 56 % to 59 %. His colleague, Nancy McArdle, added, “You didn’t get a big increase in the share of kids that are going to their closest school… it’s unfortunate that transportation has been so difficult.”
These findings underscore what we discussed earlier: transportation frustrations stem from longstanding operational and logistical inefficiencies, not simply from integration design. Expanding the variance does not provide a meaningful solution to transportation challenges.
Moving Forward: Data, Transparency, and Smart Solutions
If the district is also exploring zoning model changes, those proposals must be evaluated together with any variance adjustments. Variance, zoning, and placement patterns interact in complex ways — and isolating one variable without showing how it affects the others risks misleading conclusions.
Change in a complex system like ours should be thoughtful, data-informed, and clearly linked to the challenges we’re trying to solve. The community deserves to see the modeling, projections, and analysis that underpin any proposed adjustments to III. It has been suggested that we simply want to “wait and see” but that isn’t hesitation — it’s accountability. It’s what being “data-driven” is - it’s a call to show and share the evidence so families and staff can trust the process and understand its real-world impact.
Increasing the III variance won’t fix the core problems of transportation challenges — and it won’t meaningfully cut costs. What will?
Smarter, community-driven solutions:
Reviewing placements for outliers that create inefficiencies or extend routes unnecessarily.
Aligning transportation routes with actual student placements.
Exploring a small district-owned fleet to supplement our outsourced vendor.
Investigating creative approaches, like jitneys or smaller vehicles, to improve flexibility and reliability.
We can make transportation safer, more reliable, more equitable, and more cost-effective — while protecting the integrity of our integration model and ensuring we are actually living out our promise to make “data-driven” decisions, by assessing and evaluating evidence. The goal remains what it has always been: excellent, equitable, integrated schools that work for every child.
