What We Know and Don’t About Busing
This morning, 450,000 schools buses, many running double routes, rounded up 25 million kids – over half of all public school students – and hauled them off to school, covering about 22 million miles along the way. That was today. And it will be the same tomorrow.
Over the course of the school year, these busses will travel a stunning 4 billion miles and eat up over $15 billion of public education dollars, about 8 percent of total current expenditures for K-12 schools.
There will be about 10 billion student-passenger trips. There are more passenger trips on school buses each year than in the entire public bus transit system nationwide.
As rural schools consolidate and attendance areas get larger, these numbers will get larger. Today, we spend twice as much per pupil on school transportation as we did in 1967, after adjusting for inflation.
What do we know about this massive part of our education system? Quite a bit.
We know how to calculate the expected life cycle of a bus, the optimum time (in years or mileage) to replace one, the precise maintenance schedule, how to design school facilities to optimize bus traffic flow and to minimize safety risks, how to schedule routes for optimum efficiency, how to select the right combination of busses for your school’s fleet, how to make buses safe without seatbelts, how to train drivers to deal with emergencies, and a great deal more.
In other words, we know a lot about the things that are technically, financially, legally, or administratively important to know. On other matters we know less.
We do not know how bus rides affect student achievement, homework completion, dropout rates, graduation rates, grade retention rates, eating and sleeping habits, participation in challenging courses or extra-curricular activities, or family and peer group relations. We certainly do not know how long a ride produces how much effect in these areas.
We are learning more all the time about air quality issues and the effect on students of gaseous emissions from buses. But even in this area we are only beginning to accumulate evidence.
Some rural children in this country spend as much time on the bus as they do in the academic classroom. And more are being asked every year to spend a bigger share of their day on the bump and grind express. As rural schools close, more are expected to ride longer to schools further away from home.
And in case you’re wondering, yes, this captive audience of children makes a great advertising market for companies hoping to buy their way into the school bus radio. And why shouldn’t school officials take their money? Got to pay for that gasoline somehow.
You get the feeling that the bigger and more expensive the transportation system gets, and the longer the bus rides children must endure, the less apt we are to get answers to any questions that might challenge the wisdom of long bus rides to big schools far from home.