Sixth grader Andrel Henderson has missed more than one hundred days of school this year. A couple weeks ago, a school social worker arrived at his home to confront his mother Charise Henderson about his chronic absenteeism.
"So I said, 'Hold on, but never are y'all addressing he didn't have transportation,'" Charise explained.
Wake County Schools has assigned three of Charise's sons, Andrel, Keanthony, and Zamont, to take vans to school driven by contracted vendors instead of a typical yellow school bus, because each of her sons has special needs. They rely on these vans.
"I don't drive, and so if I don't have the money to take them to school in a cab, they can't get to school," Charise said, adding that it costs $20 to $60 for each round-trip cab ride to send her three sons to different schools.
Charise knows exactly how much a cab is to each school because she's paid it before, but she can't afford to do that regularly. That's why she was so frustrated when the social worker asked her to write down an excuse for every day Andrel missed school.
"So I'm looking at the paper and I'm like, 'Well, February, you know he didn't have no transportation. The beginning of March, no transportation. Two weeks in December, no transportation," Charise said.
Andrel has sickle cell disease. Unexpected flare-ups can cause swelling in his legs so painful that he can't walk. Charise says if he misses a few days of school because of this, the special education van stops coming to pick him up all together.
"They're making him lose his education when he is well enough to go to school," Charise said.
Wake County Schools received 16,000 complaints about special transportation since fall 2020
The impacts on this family are deep, but the Hendersons' problems with the special education transportation at Wake County Schools are not isolated. According to the district, about 3,200 students use vendor transportation, including students with disabilities, students experiencing homelessness, and preschool students served by public schools.
A public records request revealed the school district has received more than 16,000 complaints about this service in the last six years via phone calls or online submissions to the district's transportation department. Five thousand of those complaints were about drivers not showing up at all.
Wake County Public Schools Disability Bus Complaints
Aug 1, 2020 to March 18, 2026
| Category | Number per Category |
|---|---|
| Vendor No Show | 5,393 |
| Vendor Timeless | 4,372 |
| Accommodation Concerns | 2,975 |
| Failure to Start On-Time | 1,355 |
| Other - Vehicle Concern | 839 |
| Other - Driver Concern | 641 |
| Other - Equipment Concern | 244 |
| Other - Capacity Concern | 136 |
| Other - Safety Asst. Concern | 132 |
| Grand Total | 16,087 |
WUNC spoke with four parents who have had persistent problems with their vendor. Families said they've received calls from principals that the van never arrived to bring a child home. They described canceling work meetings, piling younger siblings into cars, or calling on friends to help get their child to or from school — not once or twice a year, but several times a week.
Charise is one of the many parents who has called the district's transportation department to complain. It hasn't changed anything, so she asked a lawyer to file a formal state complaint alleging that Wake County Schools is violating her children's right to an education.
"I am my kids' voice, so I am the mother that I have to be to support them," Charise said.
State denies request for a systemic investigation
Charise's attorney, Cari Carson at Disability Rights NC, filed that complaint in February to ask the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction to conduct a systemic investigation into Wake County Schools' special transportation.
"We would say that this is definitely a systemic issue. It's affecting multiple students in different situations, but affecting them in similar ways. They're not getting to school on time or at all," Carson said.
Carson said the idea for filing a systemic complaint was that, if found in violation, the school district would have to find a systemic remedy to fix the problem.
"We're asking the district to urgently create a system that gets kids with disabilities to and from school on time every day," Carson said.
Carson said as far as she knows, this issue is particular to Wake County Schools.
"I am not sure how other districts do it, but I do know that in my legal career, the calls I've gotten about this have been from Wake County Public Schools," Carson said.
The Department of Public Instruction denied Disability Rights NC's request for a systemic investigation, stating that the complaint failed to name a policy, procedure, or practice that discriminated against all students with disabilities in the district. DPI declined WUNC's request for an interview about the individual investigation into the complaint because the case is still open.
Disability Rights NC filed this complaint without knowing someone had done the exact same thing six years ago.
State investigated WCPSS in 2020: 'We were hoping that it would have been a systemic correction going forward'
Hannah Russell is a special education advocate who filed the 2020 complaint. When she read a news article in August 2019 about Wake County parents describing problems with their children's transportation, it raised alarm bells. She believed this wasn't in compliance with federal laws protecting students with disabilities.
"That's a pretty big violation," Russell said. "Like, you can't get around that. Like, the kids are not in school."
Russell is the mother of students with disabilities, and was pursuing a master's degree in special education at the time. She said the case felt like a red flag because the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) was established to ensure children with disabilities could attend public schools.
"All of IDEA was fighting for kids to go to school, like it wasn't even about inclusion at that point. It was just to be able to get through the door," Russell explained.
Russell filed a formal state complaint on behalf of five families. After an investigation, state officials responded. The final report didn't find the district to have a systemic violation, because there was no discriminatory policy that could be found, but state officials did require corrective action districtwide.
"So we felt like we won, not only for most of the students named in the state complaint, but also for all of the students in the district," Russell said.
The state required the district to identify all the students affected and make amends. Wake County Schools offered those students free tutoring for the class time they missed or paid parents mileage for the times they drove them to school when a bus didn't come. The remedy only applied to students that year.
"I was hoping — we were hoping — that it would have been a systemic correction going forward," Russell said.
The district continues to offer to reimburse parents $25 a day, up to $500 a month, for mileage to drive their children to or from school instead of using a contracted vendor. But the underlying problem continued, affecting a whole new crop of students each year.
Parents say its 'not an equal service' to busing for non-disabled students
It took Cosette Harol by surprise when her son first started using special transportation last year as a kindergartner.
"Because they told us, when we were assigned the special needs busing, that the service was equal to the service of the other students in the county who rode the yellow buses — and it was just so far from the case," Harol said.
While her other children hopped onto their yellow school bus, half the time her son's van came late or not at all. It might come anywhere within a two-hour window. The family resorted to having her son eat his breakfast by the door to watch for his van. Her son has autism and can grow impatient and become dysregulated.
"He might be banging, or he might be not able to focus," Harol said. "It would just create both distress in him, and then distress in the household."
WUNC News is not using her son's name to protect his privacy about his diagnosis.
Harol says because of his autism, he especially needs a consistent schedule to thrive. Like many other families, Harol often called the school district to complain.
"They would either shift me to somebody else, or then just tell me that it was the way it was, and that there wasn't a way to change it," Harol said.
In a statement, a Wake County Schools spokesperson said: "We recognize that special transportation has been an area of concern for some families. Like districts across the country, WCPSS and its vendors have faced ongoing challenges related to driver shortages and difficulty filling vacancies. These staffing gaps have impacted the ability to consistently provide on-time pickups. In response, the district is actively working to bring in additional vendors and expand capacity to better meet student needs."
"Since 2019, we have implemented multiple strategies to support families and improve service reliability, including offering mileage reimbursement and later a daily transportation stipend for families who choose to provide their own transportation."
Harol said district staff have also pointed to budget pressures as a reason for the unreliable service.
"I just really don't feel like, if somebody has a budget issue, that they can decide to discriminate in order to relieve their budget problem," Harol said.
Although her son was reassigned to a different vendor this year that provides reliable service, Harol reached out to Disability Rights NC and jointly filed the state complaint alongside the Hendersons. She says the district offered her a settlement to resolve the state complaint, including tutoring services for her son for class time he missed last year.
"I turned it down because that's not what I'm interested in," Harol said. "I want the service to be better for our students."
The Department of Public Instruction has until April 21 to respond to the complaint.
