Summary
School districts across the U.S. are reducing bus services due to driver shortages and shifting transportation responsibilities to families, disproportionately affecting low-income households.
In Chicago, where only 17,000 of 325,000 students are eligible for buses, parents are turning to alternatives like ride-hailing apps.
Startups such as Piggyback Network and HopSkipDrive provide school transportation by connecting parents or contracting directly with districts, offering safety measures like real-time tracking and driver vetting.
Critics warn these solutions don’t fully address systemic inequities, as many families still struggle to afford or access reliable school transportation.
America should really fix their public transport already.
Where I’m from, kids just take the regular bus, not a school specific one, because why should a school have their own bus system, when there’s buses driving around anyways?
America should really fix their public transport already.
Say what’s in it for the private corporations that ran it into the ground and America will listen. Won’t you people stop for one second and think of the shareholders?!
Same goes for where I grew up/live - kids that live far away enough to not be able to walk/bike get free passes for public transit and take that to school.
Time? Safety?
Here kids mostly walk.
It would help if driving a bus wasn’t such a shitty job. "Okay, we’re gonna pay you for three hours in the morning, then you’ll have a five hour break, then we’ll pay you another three hours. So it’ll be an 11 hour day and we’ll pay you for six of them. But you get a break!
It’s not that shitty, maybe. In the district where I work, we get $31 an hour (for about 5 hours a day), health insurance (the main reason I do it) and eventually a small pension. The break in the middle of the day is great since I can go for a bike ride and have lunch and a long nap, and I can take my elderly parents to doctors’ appointments as necessary. In other districts it does suck though, since the pay can be much less (more like $18-22 an hour) with no benefits.
I’ve heard of a lot of people who drive a bus for the health insurance. Maybe their partner has a decent job that can cover most expenses, but no decent health plan. It’s an alternative for some. It shouldn’t be, but that’s another issue.
Yeah, there are certainly worse jobs. Just that getting paid for 25 hours while effectively being busy for 50 hours a week (with breaks between) is a huge drawback.
“Oh, and you get to deal with kids the whole time but with almost no power to enforce the rules. What do you mean you want a bus monitor?”
My kid could take the bus but doesn’t because they’re overcrowded and rife with bullying.
Yep, that’s been our experience. We have a niece who got a concussion from a bully (aluminum water bottle) and really nothing changed (so her parents had to find a way to get her off the bus). Two school years back and in a different area, there were so few drivers that my kiddo would come home at completely unpredictable times, anywhere from “on-time”, up to 2 hours late, with very little communication. And we could basically see the school from our house.
Needless to say we no longer see the school bus as viable. Our society can’t even get our kids to and from school in a functional way anymore. Things are really bad.
Edit: missed a word, grammar
I assume there wasn’t a walking path even though the school was rather close?
Still sometimes shocked when hearing about how little public transport the U.S. has. I walked home by myself in my last year of primary school, then took the metro/bus in secondary school, which was pretty much normal.
There was no walking path, no. There was, however, a huge stretch of unused farm land between the neighborhood and the school. The owners of the land fought bitterly to prevent access.
Neat.
When I was a kid, most of the school bus drivers were farmers who drove as a side job, and went back to doing their usual farm work during the middle of the day.
Will taxes that used to cover bussing go down? Or is that money just going into pockets while the common person pays even more to get their kids to school?
Well, we just voted down all the levies to build new schools. So it’s not like the schools are getting that money.
(If funding stays the same but students double, they have less money.)
Not in Chicago that’s for sure. The city where you have to pay an ‘entertainment tax’ on your Netflix subscription.
Yup.
In Philly they pay the parents to take their kids to school
This is why this family is getting into politics. Campaigning starts March 4th. People won’t vote for the school levies and much of the state money is going to charter schools, but gotta start somewhere.
It’s like no one anywhere wants to take responsibility for any of our systems.
They just blame it on the workers and say no one wants to work. Ignoring the fact that that has always been true and that the way to entice people to work is by giving them money. No one wants to share the wealth.
Best we can do is accountability, as in we have an accountant cut fatter checks to our corporate leaders.
One of the benefits of big bureaucracy (whether public or private) is that it’s super easy to shift the blame around so nobody is ever held responsible for anything and there’s little accountability.
s/driver shortages/districts not willing to pay drivers enough to put up with snotnosed kids/g
Not often I see sed in the real world.
Or they could just bike to school like normal kids.
Oh just bike to school yeah that’s easy. Because this is a country that’s so very bikable.
Then fix that.
And in the mean time?
In the meantime children need to die for their utopia get with the program
Well its not going to become safe to walk or bike if everyone abandons the idea entirely. Demand creates solutions.
Walk?
The public school my daughter would have to walk or bike to in your scenario would be down rural roads with no sidewalks before sunrise, roads people shoot down at 30 miles above the speed limit, and across a four-lane highway with no traffic lights.
But it’s nice to know that you’re willing to sacrifice other people’s children for not being “normal kids.”
(It’s always fascinating to me that some people think everyone lives in a city.)
It’s always fascinating to me that some people think everyone lives in a city.)
I grew up in a rural area. I had to cycle to high school every day for 5 years. Regardless of weather. 12 kilometers each way. Not just me, everyone in my school and pretty much every other school in the country. Plenty of kids who had to cycle much farther than me as well.
I just looked it up. It would have been a 10-mile (16 kilometer) ride for me, starting at 7 am each morning. I just checked the route in Google maps and there is still no shoulder, street lights, or sidewalk for any of it.
Mind, students weren’t allowed to have backpacks on account of school shooting fears. So, carrying supplies home would also have been an issue.
How many traffic light-free four-lane highways did you have to cross? More or less than zero? How often did cars zip by you in the darkness going 150% the speed limit?
Because you ignored those things that I brought up and talked about distance, which I didn’t mention.
I do that currently do that but I doubt most kids would. Its pretty dangerous because of the bad infastructure.
