If you have followed this work for any length of time, you know I am relentless about data. Not because I love spreadsheets, but because I learned, in the hardest way a person can learn anything, that what we choose to measure is what we choose to protect. A story out of Boston just showed the whole country what happens when we get the measuring wrong.

In April 2025, a 5 year old Boston kindergartner named Lens Joseph was run over and killed by his own school bus. A child who should be starting first grade this fall instead became a case number. And then something happened that I cannot stop thinking about.

The crash that wasn't in the record

Reporters at WBUR and ProPublica went looking at the federal safety record of the company that operated Lens's bus, a company called Transdev, one of the largest transit operators in the country. They expected to find the crash that killed him. Instead, they found no sign in the federal safety data that the company was involved at all.

Then it got worse. The reporters found at least 42 fatal crashes connected to the company over the past decade that were simply missing from its federal safety record. Dozens of people killed, and in the national database that is supposed to tell regulators, school districts, and parents which bus companies are dangerous, those deaths were invisible.

Why a missing number kills

Here is why this is not a paperwork problem. The entire safety system runs on that data. Regulators use crash records to decide which companies to investigate. School districts use safety records to decide which companies to trust with their students. Parents assume that somewhere, someone is keeping an honest count. When the crashes never make it into the record, an unsafe operator looks clean, keeps its contracts, and keeps driving our children to school.

The lawmakers now demanding answers said it plainly. Without accurate and complete data, a regulator cannot target the unsafe companies, because it does not even have the information to know they are unsafe. A senior member of Congress put it in one sentence: we cannot save lives if we do not have accurate data. I want to sit on that sentence, because it is the entire reason Safe Schools For Alex exists.

This is why we count

The whole idea behind our School Safety Dashboard is that transparency is not a nice extra. It is a safety measure in its own right. When the numbers are complete and honest, you can see the danger coming and act before it arrives. When the numbers are full of holes, the danger hides in the gaps until a family finds it the terrible way.

And we see this same failure everywhere in this work. Warning signs that were documented but never connected. Educator misconduct that never made it into a database. And now, fatal crashes that never made it into a safety record. Different tragedies, the same root cause. The information existed. The system did not capture it, or did not capture it honestly.

The good news is what accountability looks like when people pay attention. Two U.S. senators have given the federal regulator a deadline to explain the missing crashes. Officials in Boston have asked for an independent review of the district's bus safety. A member of Congress has asked federal regulators to investigate the company. The company says it follows every reporting requirement, and the agency says it is investigating. Good. That is pressure working. But it should not have taken the death of a 5 year old and two newsrooms doing the government's counting for anyone to notice.

A 5 year old should still be here. The least we owe him is a set of numbers that tell the truth, so the next family does not have to learn this the way his did.

For Alex. And for all of them.

Max Schachter

Learn more about how complete, transparent school safety data protects kids at schoolsafetydashboard.org.