Why Tech Is Prepping To Overhaul School Transportation – Forbes

A stranger watching children file out of San Francisco’s Rooftop School when the bell peals each afternoon might look around for a time machine. Down the left side of the driveway walks a group of children slated for “parent pickup” while down the right a teacher leads a line of almost exclusively African American and Latino kids toward buses. It would all have a Little Rock Nine sort of feel, but for the absence of national guardsmen and the laughing salutations exchanged across the space. That this is San Francisco Unified School District’s transportation success story helps explain why some are calling for change.

More than 25 million children, over 55% of U.S. public K-12 students, climb aboard school buses each day, according to “Beyond the Yellow Bus,” a 2014 report from the Center for Cities and Schools at the University of California, Berkeley. But in many places, “a lot of transportation … has been cut over the last ten years,” says San Francisco Board of Education Member Matt Haney. In his city, fewer than 10% of public elementary students now ride school buses, with ridership among non-special education students decreasing from 3300 to 1700 between 2011 and 2017, and schools served for these kids falling from 58 to 33. As a result, even though San Francisco offers citywide school choice—allowing all students to apply to any of its 100-plus public elementary programs—many schools are in reality accessible only to those who live within walking distance or whose parents have the time and money to drive.

The link between limited school transportation and decreased school choice is neither conjecture nor specific to San Francisco. A 2009 report out of the University of Washington demonstrated with a survey of parents in Denver and Washington, D.C. that “transportation is indeed a barrier to choice.” Lots of parents told researchers they would have chosen a different school if better transportation options had been available, but the following groups were particularly likely to say so: “lower-income parents, minority parents, single parents, parents with less education and parents in Spanish-speaking households.” It’s not just because these caregivers often have less access to reliable cars, but also that schools considered “good” tend to be located in higher-income areas. In other words, low-income students generally have farther to go and less capacity to get there. Some refer to this phenomenon as the “geographic opportunity gap.”

When lack of transportation means less dispersion, it is a source of both economic and racial isolation, leaving diverse cities with segregated schools. In San Francisco that looks like Cesar Chavez Elementary with a student body that’s 88% Latino and John Yehall Chin Elementary at 90% Asian. Since diversity benefits all kids, the situation doesn’t just hurt students and teachers at schools such as Dr. Charles R. Drew College Preparatory Academy where 85% qualify as socioeconomically disadvantaged, but also at places like Grattan Elementary School where wealthier, whiter students cluster.

One obvious solution is using public transit, but that can be difficult, in part because of the way buses are controlled. Some school buses are owned and operated by school districts, but a large chunk of yellow bus service (72% in Pennsylvania as of 2012) is contracted out, much of it to national and international companies. The lobbying power of these for-profit enterprises is significant, and the Federal Transit Administration enforces a “tripper rule” prohibiting transit agencies that receive federal funding (which is almost all of them) from operating public bus service “in competition with private school bus operators.” Most localities work around the rule by having public bus routes happen to run past schools and sending extra buses around start and release times, but doing so requires inter-agency cooperation and sometimes controversy.

What’s more, many families can’t afford two tickets a day, and even when cities waive those charges through programs like YouthPass in Portland, Oregon, “the other big thing,” says Todd Ely, director of the Center for Local Government Research and Training at the University of Colorado, Denver, “is just age. So for high schoolers it totally makes sense … but elementary-aged kids [aren’t] going to ride a city bus by themselves.”

More fundamentally, both traditional school busing and public transit are what’s known as “fixed-route transportation” and therefore require making several stops along an indirect path (or a hub-and-spoke arrangement where kids ride to a central point and then out in a different direction). This design translates to long swaths of time spent sitting, something a country grappling with an obesity epidemic can ill afford. The time isn’t just sedentary but also often wasted, managed in triage fashion with drivers struggling to prevent bullying and antics like slithering out the windows. (A pamphlet from the American Federation of Teachers on managing bus time features tips like “never put a student off your bus” and “never use profanity.”)

It’s not uncommon for rural and urban children to spend more than two hours a day on the bus while their counterparts who can walk or be chauffeured to school attend dance class or SAT prep. This “hidden curriculum” has been associated with the achievement gap between low-income students and their peers, and it also includes clubs, internships and relationship-building with teachers and administrators. Members of San Francisco’s African American Parent Advisory Council told school board members in March of 2017 that being “shipped across town” to a better school also means higher truancy rates (because running a few minutes late translates to a missed day) and having to wake up earlier than other kids.