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Education officials across the United States are increasingly facing a fundamental challenge: how do they ensure that school students can actually get to their classrooms?
The bright yellow school bus might be a visual icon of US education famous around the world, but in reality it is becoming harder for districts to steer.
Student transportation has become more difficult for districts in the US in recent years due to factors such as a shortage of bus drivers, budget constraints, and the growth of the school choice movement.
This year, school officials in states such as Arizona; Connecticut; Florida; Idaho; New Jersey; New York; Ohio; Oregon; and Virginia have either reduced, or proposed reducing, student transportation services.
District leaders are trying to solve the transportation issues, which not only make life harder for parents but can lead to worse academic outcomes for students.
“It’s an especially important thing for families who don’t have reliable forms of transportation or others who they can regularly turn to for help,” said Jeremy Singer, assistant professor of education at University of Michigan-Flint, who has studied school transportation and absenteeism. “If schools reduce their school bus offerings, that means more families driving, which means more money on gas, more traffic and more emissions.”
Eighty percent of US districts have seen their transportation operations impacted by bus driver shortages, and 73% have seen such operations impacted by budget shortages, according to a 2025 report from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. The study was conducted in partnership with HopSkipDrive, a school rideshare company.
Experts trace many of the problems to the Covid-19 pandemic, when most schools shifted to remote learning, which, of course, meant there was less need for bus drivers. They then had to find other employment, and when schools reopened, some didn’t return. In August 2019, there were more than 223,000 US school bus drivers, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning research group; in August 2025, there were only 202,000, a 9.5% decrease.
“If you want to drive to make money, it’s a lot easier to drive for Uber or Lyft than it is to drive a school bus,” said Sarah Cordes, a Temple University associate professor who studies education and urban policy. “Driving a school bus requires all kinds of training,” and “it’s not an easy job if you are dealing with a vehicle full of children.”
Public education systems, like the rest of the economy, have also been affected by inflation and more recently, increased gas prices. During the 2025-26 school year, more than half of school district leaders said their diesel fuel costs exceeded what they had budgeted, according to a survey from the School Superintendents Association. A quarter said they had to cover the overruns by transferring funds from other programs, and 19% said they had used reserve funding.
Districts also have less money to cover expenses because enrollment has decreased due to declining birth rates and parents increasingly sending their children to private or charter schools or homeschooling them, Singer said.
That enrollment decline has meant districts get less tax money.
But unlike some other expenditures, like elective class educators or technologies, districts have a harder time reducing the number of bus routes because students are still dispersed the same way throughout a district, Cordes said. Cutting buses would then require existing drivers to expand their routes, and students would spend more time in transit.
“Theoretically you could reduce routes but then depending on where kids live relative to each other and relative to school, that could mean that you have kids on the bus for an hour, an hour and a half, two hours,” Cordes said. “If kids are on the bus for more than an hour, that is not good for their attendance.”
Districts are now experimenting with other ways to get kids to school besides the yellow buses, including rideshare companies focused on students, like HopSkipDrive, that use small vehicles.
But regulations pose a challenge, Singer said. The federal School Bus Safety Amendments passed in 1974 require that new vehicles that carry 11 or more persons meet the same motor vehicle safety standards as school buses.
The Heritage Foundation, a conservative thinktank, called for the repeal of the law, arguing that states need “more tools in their transportation toolbox than yellow buses to meet the modern challenge”.
The National Association of State Directors of Pupil Transportation Services, a trade association of government officials overseeing school bus services, disagreed, stating that the law improved safety for students and that “using vehicles other than school buses compromises student safety and heightens the potential for disastrous crashes.”
But such a regulation creates additional costs because of the safety features needed to comply and limits flexibility on which vehicles districts can use, Singer said.
Ohio is among the states grappling with a significant bus driver shortage. In 34 districts, fewer than 10% of vacant bus driver positions were filled, according to a report published in June from the Ohio pupil transportation workgroup, which the state tasked with solving the school busing challenges.
Transportation cost Ohio districts an average of $1,273 per student during fiscal year 2026, an almost 5% increase over the previous year.
Meanwhile, the state’s public school district enrollment decreased by almost 100,000 students between 2016 and 2025, and 124 districts projected negative cash balances by 2029, the worst rate since the Great Recession, the Columbus Dispatch reported.
The state also still requires public schools to transport students who attend charter and private schools.
During the most recent school year, Ohio districts labeled more than 22,000 students “impractical to transport”, which allowed them to pay families in lieu of actually transporting their students, according to the transportation workgroup.
The group recommended that the state phase out the “impractical to transport” designation. Instead, Ohio “should establish a clear statewide policy that every transportation-eligible student receives safe and reliable transportation”.
The state could accomplish that by allowing “districts to coordinate with families of community and chartered nonpublic school students to identify centralized locations to serve as initial collection and drop-off points” and reviewing the “bus driver training model for opportunities to compress the timeline”, among other measures, the report stated.
Columbus City Schools transports 20,000 students to its schools and 8,000 to private and religious schools, according to Michael Brown, the district’s chief of communications and engagement.
School officials are considering reducing service to high school students because of the high costs, Brown stated. Eliminating the impracticality option would create a new unfunded mandate, he added.
Meanwhile, Ohio’s governor, Mike DeWine, a Republican, in 2025 approved legislation that caps how much funding school districts receive when property values increase, a measure aimed at reducing property tax increases not approved by voters. It will reduce revenue for schools by at least $1.7bn over the next three years, Ideastream Public Media reported.
“We continue to be concerned about the state’s lack of full, fair funding to meet the actual costs” of transportation, Brown stated in an email to the Guardian.
Cordes, of Temple University, said districts in Ohio and elsewhere must “weigh the costs and benefits of expanding access”.
“You may be getting more kids to school”, she said but “that might take away from the district’s ability to spend money on other important things that have to happen in the classroom”.
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