PGCPS board orders audit of $3.2M 'Chipmunk' routing app after chaotic first week of school

The Prince George's County Board of Education on Aug. 27 directed a formal contract review and operational audit of the district’s new Chipmunk routing and tracking application after dozens of parents, bus drivers and routing staff described chaotic routes, missing buses and multi-hour commutes during the first days of school.

Board member Dr. Felton Moss moved the review, saying the district had spent approximately $3,200,000 on the app and that it supports routing and tracking for roughly 80,000 students. "The Chipmunk application has failed to perform the contract specifications resulting in persistent tracking failures, inaccurate location data, and widespread disruption for families and transportation operators," Dr. Moss read. The board adopted the motion by no objection, adding a friendly amendment to seek stakeholder feedback as part of the review.

Parents and drivers told the board the problems were immediate and severe. PGCPS bus driver Melissa Behringer said run sheets required drivers to be in multiple places at once and called the schedules "impossible to execute," saying, "You have literally set us up to fail." Another driver, Therese Middleton, said the app threw error codes on day one and left thousands of students stranded; she told the board the rollout lacked adequate training and that some buses were not even equipped with the software.

Chipmunk’s company representative apologized in person to the PGCPS community and said the outage on Tuesday followed an unexpectedly large number of users accessing the app, which exceeded their test assumptions. The company distinguished between an application outage and data issues — for example, when a bus is substituted and the data feeds no longer match the original route — and said it was working to stabilize the platform.

Superintendent Dr. Sean Joseph acknowledged the system failures and said the district initially reported roughly 10,000 students were not routed (a figure the administration later said had fallen to about 6,500 as it worked the backlog). Joseph pledged short-term and longer-term steps to stabilize service, including expanding routing capacity, adding supervisory roles and improving communication with families. He set the goal of completing the immediate backlog by Saturday but cautioned that stabilization would take longer.

The board’s adopted directive asks the superintendent and the Department of Internal Audit to conduct a comprehensive review covering technical compliance, uptime logs, GPS accuracy, vendor deliverables, financial oversight and contingency planning. Internal Audit director Dina Thorpe said she would work on a timeline but warned that a 30-day final report — the period requested in the written motion — was not feasible given existing audit responsibilities.

What happens next: the board asked administration to provide a plan for the audit and to withhold nonessential supplemental payments or optional contract extensions pending the review’s findings. Parents and drivers who spoke requested a transparent public dashboard of route status, clearer communication channels and immediate fixes to routing and staffing to reduce excessive ride times.