The Alexandria City Public School Board will not support a proposal to use DASH buses to transport high school students, Chair Michelle Rief announced on Monday night, effectively ending months of work on a cost-saving initiative that exposed deep-seated tensions between the board and the City Council.
“After several months of thoughtful discussion and deliberation, the school board has determined that we cannot support moving forward with this proposal,” Rief said at the opening of the joint work session at ACPS Central Office. “While we appreciate the efforts to explore cost-saving strategies and alternative transportation options, we ultimately do not believe this approach is in the best interest of ACPS students, families, or staff.”
The announcement came before more than a dozen school bus drivers in reflective vests who watched from the audience as the two elected bodies clashed over the proposal during a contentious discussion on “Dash Update and Next Steps“, which lasted approximately seventy-five minutes.
Following Chair Rief’s announcement on the school board’s decision, Councilman Canek Aguirre walked out early, saying, “This is a waste of time.” Aguirre would return to the meeting later when the conversation turned to the last two agenda items: City Council and School Board Ways of Working and the Long Range Educational Facilities Plan.
The proposal originated from a January memo by Councilman Abdel-Rahman Elnoubi and Vice Mayor Sarah Bagley, which was supported by the full City Council, directing staff to evaluate the use of the DASH service for high school students living within a quarter-mile of routes 31 and 36A/B.
City Manager Jim Parajon said the initiative aimed to address budget pressures in a city where more than one-third of funding goes to Alexandria City Public Schools.
“Bottom line, there’s limited funding, which means that we’ve got to figure out how to manage that effectively,” Parajon said. “In ACPS, the funding that is provided to the school district is about a third, more than a third of what our city funding, total taxpayer funding. Over a third goes to ACPS.”
DASH General Manager Josh Baker presented data showing the transit system carries about 1,100 students daily and maintains an 87% on-time rate, the highest in the Washington region. The system recorded one student-involved incident last year out of approximately 400,000 student trips.
“We are proud of the fact that the students have safe rides with us,” Baker said. “The data shows that in 2024, we only had one student involved in an incident on a DASH bus.”
The proposal would have added six morning trips and 10 afternoon trips, timed within seven minutes of the school bells, with afternoon buses originating from school campuses. ACPS could have saved $282,000 annually, while DASH costs would run $210,000, creating a potential $72,000 net savings in the pilot phase. Cumulative savings were projected to reach $939,257 by the end of phase three.
But ACPS Chief Operating Officer Dr. Alicia Hart outlined significant concerns about impacts on bus drivers that ultimately doomed the proposal.
“Essentially, 52 drivers would see a reduction in contract hours due to the removal of general population high school routes from their daily schedule,” Hart said. “In addition, a key personnel impact is that 34 of these drivers would no longer qualify for employee benefits as their new contract hours would fall below the minimum benefits eligibility threshold.”
Hart emphasized that “the fiscal impact analysis is not recommending that any driver lose their job. However, it is noted that contract hour adjustments would need to be made to incur the projected savings.”
Her presentation detailed extensive safety protocols for ACPS drivers, including a 79-step pre-trip inspection required by federal law, specialized training requirements, background checks, and drug testing.
School board member Ashley Simpson Baird said removing high school routes would disrupt the multi-tiered system where drivers complete elementary, middle, and high school runs throughout the day.
“Our bus drivers are set up so that they drive elementary route, morning route, high school route, and then the same thing in the afternoon,” Simpson Baird said. “Taking out a middle portion of their schedule really truncates their workday and makes it shorter.”
Hart also revealed timing concerns. ACPS commissioned transportation consultant Transpar in 2024 to identify inefficiencies, with results delivered in April. Parajon’s DASH integration proposal followed in June.
“The executive summary from Transpar was delivered in April of 2025, and then the city manager’s phase integration proposal quickly followed in June of 2025,” Hart said. “Given this timetable, the team was not afforded the time to really operationalize some of the recommendations internally prior to the phase proposal being shared.”
At a Sept. 11 work session, school board members voiced significant concerns about the city manager’s recommendation, with several calling for scaled-back pilot programs or questioning the timing.
Despite Rief’s opening statement on Monday rejecting the proposal, the combined bodies voted 9-4 to hear presentations from city and school staff. However, after 75 minutes of presentations, only one member voted to engage in a question-and-answer session. The group took a break and moved on to other agenda items around 7:15 p.m.
Elnoubi expressed frustration with the outcome and questioned the process, noting he did not recall the school board taking a formal vote on the decision.
“My understanding is the school board makes decisions by majority votes in public, which I may have missed,” Elnoubi said. “If you can just explain when that vote happened, and if not, how does that align with the process that the school board usually has?”
Rief said she had polled board members during and after the Sept. 11 workshop and found overwhelming opposition.
“There were overwhelming concerns raised on the school board side,” Rief said. “And so the feeling was that having a conversation was not going to be very productive, given that there’s a lot of support for not moving forward with this proposal.”
Elnoubi called the outcome disappointing during remarks to the joint session.
“If we can’t work on something this small, how are we going to work on the bigger problems that are facing us in the future?” he said.
Bagley noted that ACPS currently has seven bus driver vacancies among its transportation staff and said questions raised by school board members about operational impacts, such as how removing high school routes would affect driver schedules, had not been thoroughly discussed during the months of review.
“I wish that question was the kind of questions we’d been talking about for the last six months and that we came queued up to discuss tonight,” Bagley said.
School Board Vice Chair Christopher Harris addressed broader dysfunction between the elected bodies.
“This relationship has been the same, and not one time have I heard why,” Harris said. “Maybe we need to get to the crux of the problems.”
Mayor Alyia Gaskins acknowledged the apparent impasse between the two bodies.
“The other thing that I think that I have observed is that it doesn’t seem like at this time either of our bodies have equal interest in continuing to move forward with this proposal or with this discussion,” Gaskins said. “And so my 2 cents would be that if that is the case, then that is okay. We learned something, we went through something, and it’s time to move on.”
The meeting, facilitated by former school board member Stephanie Kapsis, was also scheduled to discuss updating the Long-Range Educational Facilities Plan; however, the DASH discussion consumed more than half of the meeting. Councilman Kirk McPike and Superintendent Kay Wyatt were not present.
Rief expressed hope for future collaboration despite the setback.
“The school board remains committed to working with the city council to enhance efficiency and to deliver high-quality services for ACPS families and for all city residents,” Rief said.
The school board supports maintaining the current hybrid model, which encourages but does not mandate the use of DASH for high school students.
Mayor Gaskins struck a pragmatic note about the outcome, emphasizing that regardless of this proposal’s failure, the city’s transit system remains essential infrastructure.
“At the end of the day, DASH is still going to be needed in the city,” Gaskins said. “DASH is still going to be invested in, and DASH is still going to be an important public good.”
Related Coverage
