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Opinion: Transporting 80 kids at the same time to the same place is no longer reality for many Arizona schools. But some are finding innovative ways to adapt.
When I say public school transportation, what do you think of?
Probably a big, yellow school bus.
That’s how many of us got to school for most or part of our K-12 careers. We arrived at and departed from campus at the same time, a mass of students moving in similar directions.
That’s not the case anymore.
School choice is a big reason why. A 2017 survey found that roughly half of students in Maricopa County do not attend the school to which their neighborhood is assigned. Roughly 20% of students statewide attend charter schools, while many others use open enrollment (and often their own transportation) to attend a district school outside of their home boundaries.
But that’s not all of it. Even students who attend the school down the street have options. There are clubs, activities, sports – and especially now, extra help for kids who have fallen behind – that pull students (and families) in a million directions before and after school.
Arriving en masse on an 80-passenger school bus doesn’t work for a lot of students anymore.
Yet that remains the primary option for many schools, because transportation funding – at district schools, anyway – depends heavily on ridership and mileage for those big, yellow bus routes. (Charter schools get a fixed amount per student that can be used for transportation or other things.)
All of which puts more pressure on parents to get their kids from Point A to Point B – and in some cases, cuts off opportunities for students whose families simply can’t be their taxi driver.
These problems have only intensified since the pandemic.
A bus driver shortage has forced some schools to delay pickups, nix routes and scale back field trips. Most are offering sign-on bonuses and other perks in hopes of attracting staff. Dysart Unified School District is now starting drivers at $20 an hour to fill empty slots.
The driver shortage is so severe at Notre Dame Preparatory High School that it reportedly paid a motorcoach company at least $12,000 to transport its football team to five away games.
Is there a better way to do this?
That’s what $18 million in grants funded by the Legislature and Gov. Doug Ducey aim to find out.
The ask on the cash was purposefully simple: Bring us your ideas to offer transportation more efficiently and reliably. And schools, to their credit, ran with the challenge.
A for Arizona, which was chosen to oversee the grants, received 71 applications asking for a collective $54 million. Twenty-four were chosen, receiving anywhere from $25,000 to $2 million each.
The proposals vary widely. Some schools will use the cash to bring transportation services in-house. Others plan to contract with others to provide them.
Some schools are eyeing electric buses to reduce fuel and maintenance costs. Others plan to invest in smaller vans and shuttles, which don’t require commercial drivers, to get students to before- or after-school programs, or to transport them to career and technical programs.
Chinle Unified School District travels thousands of miles a day to reach far-flung students on the Navajo Nation, mostly on unpaved roads that quickly tear up buses. It received funding for a multi-pronged plan that includes purchasing a second four-wheel drive tow truck to rescue buses that often get stuck in the mud.
The district also will offer a reimbursement program for families that choose to drive themselves, including some that were already renting hotel rooms in town on weekdays to trim their commute time (legislative changes this year allow such in-lieu grants).
Meanwhile, Midtown Primary School, a K-4 charter school in a high poverty area of central Phoenix, hopes two walking bus routes will get more students to and from school safely and on time. Though many families live in nearby apartment complexes, some must cross a busy street to get there. Others at times arrive too late for school breakfast, after class has started or not at all.
Teachers and other paid staff will walk students to and from school in a line, wearing reflective vests and grasping a rope. They’ll message parents when they’ve arrived at school or are on their way home, and once a week plan to attach a wagon to the end of the walking bus line to deliver meals.
It’s heartening to see how creative schools got with solutions, once they were given not only the chance at funding but the flexibility to propose what might work best for their circumstances.
Maybe not all ideas will work as intended. But A for Arizona is closely tracking these pilot programs and hopes to use their experiences to help other schools that want to try something new.
That’s how it should be.
If the pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that one-size-fits-all doesn’t work anymore. The more flexibility we can offer schools to solve problems – in transportation, yes, but also in the classroom – the better off we’ll be.
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