My non-verbal autistic son has been afraid of his school bus driver for four months, and Durham is letting that driver keep his job. I submitted a fix to the Boise School District, the Mayors office, and VRT, and they ignored me. Now I built the receipt machine for Boise, for people like you and me.
Four months ago there was an incident on my son's school bus.
I wasn't there. My son couldn't tell me what happened, because my son is non-verbal autistic and legally disabled. The school escalated to law enforcement on their own. Their letter afterward made clear there had been concerns that needed attention.
He has been scared of the driver ever since.
That driver still operates the route. I have driven to the school every afternoon for four months to bring my son home myself. He is afraid to get on the bus. He cannot say it, but his body tells me, and I know my son. He should be able to ride the bus the district pays nearly ten million dollars a year to run safely. He cannot. So I drive.
I started reading about Durham.
The contract is $9.6 million a year, and the money leaves town.
The Boise School District contract with Durham School Services runs $9,576,661.78 a year for 117 routes serving roughly 6,000 students. District spokesman Dan Hollar confirmed that figure to KTVB when the contract was signed in February 2020. It was a five-year deal with a five-year renewal option that kicked in last July. We are ten months into a renewal that expires in 2030.
When the district picked Durham in 2020, First Student bid $728,000 lower. First Student was disqualified for not meeting staffing requirements. The district paid the premium because Durham promised more operational depth, more training positions, a dispatcher, a maintenance technician, an office clerk, etc...
The premium did not buy what it was supposed to, not even close.
Boise pays Durham $2,031 per student per year. The national average for student transportation, per the most recent NCES data, is $1,153. Boise sits 76 percent above the national average. That gap is not about Idaho diesel prices. It exists because Durham has to maintain a fleet that sits idle 20 hours a day, fund a separate dispatch operation, staff a corporate management layer in Illinois, and generate a return for the private equity firm that bought the company in July 2025.
That firm is I Squared Capital. They are based in Miami. They manage roughly $45 billion in assets. They paid an enterprise value of up to $608 million for the entire North American school bus division of Mobico Group, the UK-listed conglomerate that previously owned Durham. The division is rebranding as Summit School Services LLC. At a conservative 10 percent corporate margin, somewhere around $960,000 of Boise's annual contract leaves Ada County every year and ends up with institutional investors who have never set foot in Idaho.
Over the past decade, BSD's per-student transportation cost has risen 83 percent. Bus ridership has declined 25 percent over the same period. The district is paying nearly twice as much per kid to move fewer kids.
In August 2025, the Idaho Internet Crimes Against Children unit arrested Durham driver Brian Hendricks on seven counts of possession of Child Sexual Exploitation Material. He and his wife were also charged with four counts of Felony Injury to a Child after officers executing a search warrant found children living in unsafe, uninhabitable conditions at their home. Durham terminated his employment. BSD said they had received no prior complaints about him. He had passed Durham's background checks before they hired him.
In April 2026, the Ada County Sheriff's Special Victims Unit arrested Durham driver Kayden Peterson on four felony charges: sexual battery of a minor aged 16 or 17, sexual abuse of a child under 16, and two counts of lewd conduct with a minor under 16. He was booked into Ada County Jail on a half-million-dollar bond. The sheriff's office reported that the alleged conduct spanned 2015 to 2024 and involved a person Peterson knew outside of his employment, not a student on his route. He had been driving routes through Riverglen Junior High, Capital High School, Koelsch Elementary, and Morley Nelson Elementary in the weeks before his arrest. Per BSD's own published record, only part of his route had a bus monitor assigned. The rest had no monitor. He had also passed Durham's background checks.
Two felony arrests of Durham drivers in eight months. The third law enforcement event tied to a Durham driver was my son's, four months ago. That driver is still on the road.
This is not the first time Durham's screening has been called into question at scale. On November 21, 2016, a Durham bus carrying 37 children left the road in Chattanooga, Tennessee, rolled, and struck a tree. Six elementary school students died. The NTSB investigation (Report SIR-1802) found that Durham had no centralized complaint tracking system and had failed to act on multiple parent complaints about the driver's speeding and erratic behavior in the days leading up to the crash. Durham added cameras and a complaint database after. Boise's buses already have those cameras. They did not catch Peterson.
Durham's Google profile in Boise averages 2.1 stars across 47 reviews, and the complaints repeat themselves across years.
A parent wrote in November 2025 about a Durham driver who decided to punish kids for being rowdy. He pulled off the route, drove past their stop, and refused to let them off the bus. Twelve-year-olds were held on the bus until some of them popped the emergency exit and ran. The parent got a vague text from the school saying "your child's bus is returning to school and authorities are on the way." The same driver, the next morning, refused to pick anyone up at the stop. Twenty kids stood in the cold fog with no ride.
A parent wrote in September 2025 about a Durham driver who let her IEP student off the bus without a parent. Twice, in successive years. The same week, dispatch admitted to her husband that they had lost track of an entire GPS-equipped school bus and had to send a second one out to look for it.
A Marine veteran wrote in February 2026 about a Durham bus that stopped on Salt Creek Drive in front of West Junior High to unload students with no flashers and no stop sign. The driver's explanation was that "it's not an official stop." Idaho law says otherwise.
A parent wrote eight months ago about a Durham bus that simply didn't pick up her kindergartener at daycare. A five-year-old made to stand at a busy intersection alone until the daycare provided an adult escort, because Durham would not.
The reviews stretch back five years, and the complaints don't change. Neither does the contractor.
So I wrote a proposal.
After Peterson's arrest, I spent three days writing a 20-page transportation reform proposal.
The proposal opened with Idaho Code §33-1510, the procurement statute that governs how school districts award transportation contracts. The statute requires districts to award to the "lowest responsible bidder." Valley Regional Transit is a tax-exempt public authority. It does not have a corporate profit margin. When BSD issues its next RFP, VRT can submit a bid that structurally undercuts any private contractor on cost alone, because the math no longer has to support a return to investors in Miami.
From there the proposal covered the federal layer. 49 U.S.C. §5323(f) and 49 CFR Part 605 prohibit any transit agency receiving FTA funds from operating dedicated school bus service. The workaround is the tripper service model, codified in 49 CFR 605.11 and clarified by the FTA's 2008 Final Policy Statement. Transit agencies run enhanced public routes timed to school bell schedules, marked as public transit, stopping at regular stops, published in regular schedules, open to the general public. This model has been running for decades at Metro Transit in Minneapolis, Metro in Cincinnati, King County Metro in Seattle, and TriMet in Portland. For elementary students and special education populations that need traditional yellow bus service, the proposal recommended a ring-fenced VRT subsidiary funded only with local and state education dollars, no FTA money commingled, running dedicated routes.
The peer city numbers are the heart of the financial case. Minneapolis pays approximately $300 per student per year for transit-pass-based secondary student transportation, with a University of Minnesota study finding 85 percent savings, a 23 percent reduction in absenteeism, and 3.5 million student rides in the first year. Cincinnati went from approximately $3,000 per student to approximately $350 in their transit partnership for 7th and 8th graders, an 88 percent reduction, implemented in six months. Seattle's program is free for students because Washington State made public transit free for everyone under 18 in 2022. Portland's TriMet YouthPass costs about $300 per student. Boise pays $2,031. The savings range across these models runs 80 to 88 percent off the per-student cost.
The financial case for BSD alone comes out modest, somewhere between break-even and a couple million in annual savings, depending on how many secondary students shift to passes. The real number lives at valley scale. Boise School District plus West Ada (Durham's $85 million five-year contract, signed fall 2024) plus Nampa plus Caldwell plus Kuna plus Vallivue have combined private busing contracts above $38 million per year. A consolidated valley-wide model under VRT, operating through a Joint Powers Authority for unified fleet management, projects $7 to $15 million in annual recurring savings.
The accountability case wrote itself: two felony arrests of Durham drivers in eight months, 47 Google reviews going back five years describing the same kinds of failures, a fatal crash in Chattanooga the NTSB tied to Durham's complaint-tracking failures, an ownership trail running to a private equity firm in Miami, $960,000 a year leaving Ada County in corporate margin, a 76 percent premium over the national average per-student cost, and an 83 percent cost increase over a decade while ridership dropped 25 percent.
There was one more piece in there. In October 2025, the Kuna School District board voted unanimously to keep student transportation in-house. The vote came after forty bus drivers and staff testified against outsourcing. The district found Kuna already spent less per mile than the contracted districts around it. One board member said the people who know our kids and our roads don't need a multinational corporation to tell them how to drive a bus. Kuna is forty minutes from Boise.
I sent the proposal on April 10 to Mayor McLean's office and to Valley Regional Transit CEO Elaine Clegg. Three days later I sent it to every trustee on the Boise School Board. Each cover note was tailored to the trustee's professional background. The public health trustee got the social determinants framing. The operations deputy got the implementation roadmap. The board president got the executive summary. The newest trustee got the institutional inertia framing. I submitted it the way the system claims it wants policy submissions to arrive.
Then I waited.
The Mayor's office replied first. The City of Boise does not run VRT and does not execute school district procurement. The proposal was forwarded to policy staff.
The Board President replied within a day. He thanked me. He said I made an interesting case. He forwarded it to senior administration and the transportation supervisor.
The trustee with the public health background, appointed in October 2025 to fill a vacancy, replied within a day. He agreed that transportation is a major social driver of health. He explained that the board has a governance role and relies on the superintendent and her administrative team to consider proposals about district operations. He referred my message to the superintendent.
The Deputy Superintendent of Operations replied within a day. He thanked me. He said the district would share the proposal with the transportation supervisor, who meets regularly with VRT leadership.
Another trustee replied to confirm the chair had forwarded the document.
The sixth recipient was an automated acknowledgment.
Six people replied. Each of them forwarded the proposal further into the system. None of them engaged with what was in it. Nobody asked about the math, the peer cities, the timeline, or the tracking. The proposal went into a queue, and the queue has no public window.
The trustees were responsive and procedurally correct. The Mayor's office moved the proposal faster than most bureaucracies. The Deputy Superintendent's tone was impeccable. The architecture they work inside has a way to forward, acknowledge, and route to administrative review with no public deliberation timeline. That is what it has. That is all it has.
That was when I started counting...
There are TWELVE agencies.
The Boise School District handles enrollment, curriculum, busing procurement, special education, and discipline. Every road my son's bus drives belongs to the Ada County Highway District. Valley Regional Transit operates the public transit my secondary student could legally ride under the procurement framework in §33-1510 but does not. Long-range planning that decides whether the transit network ever expands lives at COMPASS. The City of Boise handles the council votes that fund VRT and the ordinances shaping every street within city limits. Ada County is responsible for property taxes, the sheriff that arrested Peterson, the courts hearing his case, and the GIS data defining every school boundary. The Idaho Legislature handles funding formulas, the Medicaid policy that affects funding for the school-based services my son receives under his IEP, the transportation reimbursement bills, and the session I walked you through. ICAC sits at the Attorney General's office. Medicaid policy and provider licensing sit at the Department of Health and Welfare. Charter authorization and curriculum standards sit at the State Board of Education. Air quality alerts that determine whether recess gets canceled come from the National Weather Service. Federal Safe Routes to School funding flows through the Idaho Transportation Department.
That is twelve agencies. There are more.
Every one of them runs its own website, login system, data portal, calendar, public records process, and update schedule. Some publish in real time. Others publish weekly or monthly. A few never publish at all, and a few publish only in formats an attorney can read.
A motivated, civically engaged parent (and most of us cannot afford to be that) cannot reliably track what is happening to their own kid across twelve agencies. The information is technically public and functionally fragmented to the point of inaccessibility. That fragmentation is what the federal lobbying class pays subscriptions to navigate. No equivalent local subscription existed in Boise because no local civic-information layer existed.
So I built one.
It is called The Relay.
You type a question in plain English. It answers from a continuously refreshed knowledge base pulled from the core Boise civic feeds...
The Ada County Highway District, the City of Boise, Ada County GIS, COMPASS, the Idaho Legislature via LegiScan, Valley Regional Transit, the National Weather Service, OpenAQ, and BoiseDev. Every answer cites its sources. Every citation links to the agency's own page so you can verify the receipt with one click. If the data isn't there, the tool says it doesn't know rather than making something up.
This is the first version. The coverage is the core civic infrastructure. The school district, the state health and welfare apparatus, and the criminal enforcement layer are not in yet. They are on the roadmap as the schema and the ingestion permits expand.
Use it on the thing that pissed you off most this year.
Ask it what road projects ACHD has active right now near your kid's school. Ask it what just passed at the Statehouse. Ask it which Idaho bills could affect Boise housing or local government. Ask it what the City Council voted on at its last meeting. Ask it when the next City Council meeting is. Ask it what the air quality reading is right now. Ask it which VRT routes serve your neighborhood. Ask it which Ada County precinct you vote in.
It is free. It does not ask for a login, does not track you, does not build a profile. There is a 30-message cap per day so the tool can't be scraped or hammered, and so you have a reason to share it with a neighbor instead of hoarding it.
Every answer ends with a sources block listing the agency name, the last refresh time in Boise local time, and the direct URL. The Data Integrity Status panel built into the tool shows you which feeds are healthy and which are degraded. The tool is transparent about its own failures.
The information was always public. The agencies just buried it across a dozen different websites that don't talk to each other.
The Boise School Board trustee election is September 1, 2026. Three seats are open.
Nancy Gregory's seat has no incumbent. She is leaving the board after 23 years to run for State Senate. Krista Hasler holds a two-year term from 2024 and must run again to keep it. Alejandro Necochea was appointed in October 2025 to fill Maria Greeley's vacancy after Greeley resigned and moved to Singapore, and he has to run as well.
The filing deadline is the ninth Friday before the September election. That puts it on July 3, 2026.
Fifty-four days from today.
Anyone 18 or older who is a registered voter in the district can file, as long as they have no financial interest in any district contract. The board meets monthly.
My son is still afraid of his bus driver. I will still drive to the school tomorrow afternoon to bring him home.
The filing deadline is July 3rd.