Researchers and reporters share tips for covering school transportation, including insight on how it intersects with other education issues, such as school choice and chronic absenteeism.
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Before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, transportation experts warned that a shortage of school bus drivers may be on the rise. From 2019 to 2024, the number of school bus drivers declined to 12.2%, according to a national report from the Economic Policy Institute.
Factors contributing to the shortage include competitive wages and market demand for rideshare and home delivery app drivers; retirement among the typical workforce of school bus drivers, and many drivers face roadblocks in obtaining the needed licensing to drive a school bus.
For years, many school district leaders have scrambled to find drivers or tested out alternative solutions for getting kids to school. Some districts are finding that the yellow school bus is no longer a viable option and that the definition of transportation is shifting given the changes in the transportation industry.
Research and journalistic reporting has shown evidence that reliable transportation is a necessity for many students to access education. This transportation reporting guide for the Education Writers Association will provide questions, research and solutions for journalists to investigate in their cities and school districts.
“A lot of teachers and administrators are faced with so many challenges that transportation ends up pretty far down the list, not unrightfully so,” said Sam Speroni, researcher and doctoral student in the department of Urban Planning at the University of California, Los Angeles.
“But when it goes wrong, it certainly highlights that it’s an important piece of the education puzzle,” he added.
School transportation challenges, including driver shortages, and their solutions have varied nationwide. At Chicago Public Schools, district officials cut transportation to magnet schools and selective enrollment schools to decrease the number of students who need buses. Some cities reimbursed students for city transportation passes or their parents or caregivers for driving costs.
“Nationwide today, half of students get to school via car, not via school bus,” said Sarah Lenhoff, associate professor of educational leadership and policy studies at Wayne State University in Detroit. “The automobile needs to be a part of any conversations about how kids get to school.”
Students, teachers, parents and school officials also say that the availability and quality of school transportation intersects with other issues, such as chronic absenteeism, school choice, academic achievement, parental responsibility and safety.
Experts and journalists who have covered this topic agree.
“If your bus is late every day, you are missing maybe the first 10 minutes of school, but that also may mean that you’re missing breakfast [at school], which a lot of students rely on,” said Jess Clark, investigative education reporter at the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting.
“You’re missing that settling in time,” she said. “That’s not like a very good mental health space to be in when you’re starting the day. That all adds up.”
Given the financial constraints that many public school districts face, transportation is often a service that is cut entirely or significantly. To set the scene for your transportation coverage, it’s important to understand what services are being offered, who receives them and where.
Some questions to ask and consider are:
Understand the school transportation plan’s specifics:
Are multiple options offered to students and families?
Are the transportation options feasible for all student demographics in your district?
Who is missing in the plan?
Do families believe the plan is safe?
“There’s a difference between a system offering a set of transportation resources and what parents and students actually think of the viability of those things,” Lenhoff said. “You might say, ‘We offer public bus passes,’ but if most of your families don’t feel comfortable riding the bus, or there’s not a bus that can get them to school in a reasonable time, then that’s not really a resource.”
Researchers Lenhoff and Speroni have worked together to examine the impacts that transportation has had on the accessibility of education.
“Schools will often say we offer this thing, but they often don’t know how many kids actually use that thing,” Lenhoff said about transportation services provided by districts.
Lenhoff has found that many districts are not tracking the number of students that use or don’t use offered transportation services and suggests that it is important to “contextualize the resource that’s being offered.”
“What we found in our own research is that many kids who are eligible to ride the bus don’t ride it, so that raises questions about why,” she said.
According to federal law, schools are only required to provide transportation to students with disabilities and those who are in foster care or are without housing. Otherwise, state governments have jurisdiction over whether to provide transportation, where and to whom.
Does a school district require a student to live within a certain mile radius to qualify for transportation?
If so, what does this mean for students who are outside the radius?
What is the application process for families requesting transportation?
The quality of the route, such as its duration, amount of transfers, reliability and sounds can impact the mental state and mood of students once they arrive at school, experts say.
How long is the commute?
Does the route require a student to wake up early?
Does the route require multiple transfers?
A long or challenging route to school can discourage students from attending classes, Clark said. “That impacts your engagement, graduation chances and ability to participate in extracurricular activities,” she said.
In Louisville, Clark has untangled how the promises of a third-party routing company has made it harder for the local school district to solve its transportation challenges.
“In all kinds of education technology contracts, people working for school districts don’t have the personnel to really vet and understand a lot of what these companies are selling,” Clark said. “They have slick marketing, and school districts are, in many cases, very desperate for a solution.”
In Baltimore, students often rely on public transportation and make multiple transfers before reaching their school. But if a student misses one of those connections, it can take more than half an hour for another to arrive, often leading to high rates of absenteeism among students, The Baltimore Banner found.
The reporting, along with a growing body of research, highlights the impacts that transportation can have on academics as well as school choice — a topic that has gained increasing attention from President Donald Trump, school officials and parents.
Without reliable school transportation for all student groups, Lenhoff argues that school choice is mainly accessible for “families that have the means and the time to transport their own children.”
“The research is pretty clear that the expansion of choice has led to more racial segregation, not less,” Lenhoff said. “I do wonder whether one explanation for that is the unequal access to school transportation that falls along lines of race and class.”
For families that have access to cars, Speroni has studied how that has impacted school choice.
“In California, where school buses are not common, we found that kids who are from families without a car are extraordinarily less likely to attend a choice school than families with a car,” Speroni said.
Attendance also has potential consequences for parents, Clark said.
“Many of these systems are connected, so your lack of transportation is going to intersect with truancy laws,” she said. “It may be important to find out how many parents are being charged in your community with truancy because they are facing these transportation challenges.”
Here are some other questions to keep in mind:
How does school choice intersect with transportation issues in your city?
If a school is part of a choice program, do they offer transportation? If not, why?
How far and wide is transportation offered?
How do parents, families and local communities feel about the accessibility of school choice programs?
How have families made it work to transport their kids?
Unlike public transportation that has many options for data collection, such as scanned passes that generate timestamps, finding data about school transportation can be especially tricky.
Clark said data can be the tool that holds school leaders accountable.
“If the superintendent is telling you it’s going better — Why? What is your data like? Show us. Prove to us that that is the case. And if they can’t, then you can prove it yourself by doing FOIA requests,” Clark said.
Below is information reporters can begin collecting now:.
What specific information does your city or state track regarding school transportation?
Here are recommendations from Sam Speroni on where to find data about school transportation:
Policy regarding school transportation is often warped and shaped by local governments, school districts and citizens, meaning that the crisis affecting school transportation can be resolved in a handful of ways.
Some districts are looking toward new business models, such as HopSkipDrive; it’s a network that allows drivers to provide transportation using their own vehicles, without a CDL license – a required licensing needed to drive a traditional yellow school bus. Critics say HopSkipDrive helps to provide an immediate need for drivers but question how feasible it is for districts and metropolitan cities.
Speroni said the service may be most useful for vulnerable student populations, such as foster and homeless youth.
“I looked at the difference between offering a transit trip and using HopSkipDrive, which was running a pilot program for foster youth in LA. They were able to get students to school within about a third of a time as if those students had been on public transit,” Speroni said.
Some districts rely on routing software to create pick-up and drop-off locations for drivers and students. In Louisville, Jefferson County Public Schools, relied on a third-party company, AlphaRoute, to create routes despite having a troubling track record, Clark said about the company. A 2024 audit found the routing software caused a failed first day of classes during the 2023-24 school year. Students were dropped off at wrong locations and late in the night.
“What we witnessed was an uninformed optimism that some MIT people are going to come in and solve all our problems. It was too good to be true,” Clark said, after reflecting on her investigations.
Clark, like many transportation researchers and policy activists, believes that one of the biggest changes needed to occur is within the profession of bus drivers.
“I think it’s going to take a reimagining of what bus driver jobs are like, what the hours are, what the salary is,” she said. “We’re not going to get more drivers doing what we’re doing.”
Many states and cities have created legislation, task forces and taken action, such as increasing wages to attract new drivers.
What previous or current legislation has your state passed to support bus drivers?
Reporters should also speak to parents, including those who are creating their own solutions.
“Many parents are going to extreme lengths to figure out these various scenarios to make sure their kids get to school and get picked up every day,” Lenhoff said. “Those stories are really important in thinking about what we need to rethink about how to provide school transportation to families.”
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