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PGCPS transportation director: Formative partnership improving routing, but staffing and parent buy-in still constrain progress
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Summary
Prince George's County Public Schools transportation director Kibo Baldwin told the audit committee that an ongoing partnership with consultant Formative has produced dashboards and measurable gains in on-time performance and vehicle utilization, but driver availability, long specialty routes and limited parent uptake of hub stops remain constraints.
Kibo Baldwin, director of transportation and central garage for Prince George's County Public Schools, told the Board of Education Audit Committee on Feb. 9 that the district's partnership with independent consultant Formative has shifted transportation work from reactive fixes to data-driven planning. Baldwin said Formative provides validation of routing work, develops dashboards and quarterly reports, and supports a transition from Transfinder to Bus Planner to improve route design and on-time performance.
Baldwin described five focus areas for the partnership — dashboards, structured strategy sessions, technical advice, quarterly reporting and action planning — and said quarterly reporting has shown gains in the first half of the 2025–26 school year: more students served, higher efficiency and stronger on-time performance. "We're no longer guessing. We're measuring," he said, adding that the district will "roll out the bus planner fully, optimize our stops, shorten long routes, improve GPS fidelity, and strengthen our driver pipeline."
Board members pressed Baldwin on pilot hub stops designed to condense pickups for specialty schools with large boundaries. Baldwin said a parent survey showed low inclination to use hub stops this school year, so the district did not implement them and will focus on parent education and capacity-building before reconsidering hubs. He explained the goal was to reduce 90-minute rides at specialty programs by consolidating stops at safe, central locations.
Several board members, including Felton Moss, asked how many routes exceed 90 minutes and what the district is doing to shorten them. Baldwin said he did not have an exact count available at the meeting but outlined operational levers: trimming stops when families opt out of transportation, improving ridership counts to plan more accurate routes, combining runs where appropriate, and hiring more drivers. Chief Operating Officer Shrozka Coleman added that driver vacancies have fallen from over 220 several years ago to 65 as of this month, which she said has significantly improved capacity to address long routes.
Baldwin also discussed planned operational tools to enable real-time adjustments: driver tablets that allow skipping stops when notified, a parent messaging feature previously tested via a text-capable "stop finder," and future integration with the Chipmunk parent app to allow families to report absences and reduce unnecessary stops. Baldwin said some dashboard and KPI work is still in development and not yet public, and he offered to share the district's quarterly reports with audit committee members.
The committee asked for follow-up data, including counts of 90-minute routes and the quarterly reports that document performance trends; Baldwin offered to provide that information by email after the meeting. The transportation team left the meeting early due to scheduling constraints, and the committee accepted Baldwin's offer to respond to additional written questions.
