A mother struggling to keep her job and get her son to school says his bus simply doesn’t show up for days at a time.
Dylan Mendez is supposed to take the bus to school every day.
“It’s pretty bad,” says Dylan. “They don’t come.”
Today, the third-grader took an hour-and-a-half walk/train/public bus journey with his mom instead.
“It’s utterly frustrating,” says Stephania Jean Baptiste, Dylan’s mother. She says the bus service has been unreliable since she temporarily had to relocate to the Bronx a couple months ago and didn’t want to pull her son from his gifted program at Brooklyn Brownstone School.
Jean Baptiste says this week Dylan was picked up by the bus only on Monday. Because of the bus issue, she says he has been late walking into school more than a dozen times in the last two months. Each time he can’t take the bus, Jean Baptiste has to miss work to take him to school.
According to Jean Baptiste, the school principal has been trying to help but hasn’t had any luck. The principal declined to speak with News 12. Jean Baptiste says Logan Bus Company and the arm of the Department of Education that oversees student transportation hasn’t given a clear answer as to what is going on.
“It’s very frustrating not being able to find anyone who can help us,” she says. “What I would love for them to do is do their job, perform their duty … that's all I really need so I can do what I need to do for my family and take care of my children.”
News 12 reached out multiple times to the school, bus company and the DOE for comment but hasn’t heard back.