PEKIN, Ill. – Pekin Public School District 108 wants its bus company to make improvements sooner rather than later.
The board met in a special meeting Monday night to address numerous issues that have occurred with Alltown Bus Service since the start of the year.
The city of Pekin approved ending bus service contracts with Districts 108 and 303 last year, with the 2025-26 school year being the final year of the deal. District 108 hired Alltown in a five-year contract in February to take over the transportation services.
The relationship got off to a rocky start. On the first day of the school year on August 19th, bus routes and schedules were inaccurate, and safeguards were not met for picking up students. The district used emergency days to cancel school for the rest of the week to address those issues, but ensuring safe and correct bus routes for preschool students has not been corrected.
Superintendent Leonard Ealey says everything seemed to be working fine in mid-July, but he noticed problems starting to pop up a week before the school year. Some of those problems included missing students, incorrect pickup information, routing errors, and ensuring safe transportation of special education students.
Ealey says buses would arrive anywhere between 30-40 minutes late, bus routes would overlap, and there were failures in communication with Alltown.
“We brought those corrections to Alltown. They kept promising they were going to be corrected. They were sent to us, we reconnected, go back, verify it, reverify it, double check, triple check, and it just wasn’t getting satisfaction with their service,” Ealey said.
Ealey says the lack of communication, the lack of following through with concerns, and not putting students first makes the issues bigger than just mistakes in a first-year contract.
Four parents spoke during the public comment portion of the meeting about their concerns with the busing troubles. Matthew Johnson called it a “total failure of the education process,” and urged the board to hold Alltown’s feet to the fire.
Rebecca Craig, who has a 4th grader at Wilson Intermediate, slammed the board and the superintendent for not showing remorse or giving an apology after the first day troubles. She then thanked teachers, principals, and bus drivers for helping students on that day.
Jeff Childers also has a student at Wilson Intermediate, and raised concerns about Alltown. Childers brought up Alltown’s rating with BBB, a D-. He also asked the board if buses are going to multiple schools, instead of one. Childers finished by asking why drivers did not have medical information for students on their buses.
Peter Delani from Alltown spoke after Ealey’s prepared comments. Delani told the board and the crowd that the company was not hiding from its mistakes. He told everyone that they came to listen to what the issues were. In addition, Delani told the crowd that Alltown was planning to work on improving communications, as well as an internal audit to find out what went wrong.
Delani declined to elaborate on his comments after the meeting.
After the meeting, Ealey stated that he wanted to hear more from Alltown, mainly specifics on what went wrong and what they could do better.
Before the meeting ended, the board approved an authorized Issuance of Notice of Default and Opportunity to Cure against Alltown. Ealey says there are 38 items that Alltown would need to correct by the end of September.
But Ealey says after the way the past month has gone, there’s not a lot of hope the issues will be corrected.
“There’s been several false starts, so I don’t know if I’m very confident, but the next couple weeks will tell,” Ealey said.
Ealey says if things are not corrected by Alltown, the district could look at other bus services or penalties against the company.
Comments