The yellow school bus – once a symbol of integration – has become a relic from another era.

Before sunrise on school days, 7-year-old Laike Glesne would lug his backpack from the public bus in Chicago to the train and then onto the second train to get to his second-grade classroom, which was 20 miles south of his home.

During the two-hour drive last school year, Glesne and his mother, Marissa Lichwick-Glesne, passed homeless people sleeping on the streets, partygoers heading home and angry people shouting insults. The day had just begun, and the mother and son didn’t get home until 7 p.m. — leaving him no time for after-school activities.

Lichwick-Glesne didn’t know that this morning rush would become their reality when she enrolled her son in kindergarten at Ted Lenart Regional Gifted Center, a school where high-achieving children learn above their grade level. At the start of last school year, Chicago Public Schools announced it would suspend bus service for the 5,500 students in magnet and selective enrollment programs far from home, citing a shortage of school bus drivers.

Lichwick-Glesne said she panicked and thought, “How am I going to get him to school?”

Chicago Public Schools reinforced that decision this year, joining many other school districts across the country that have eliminated or curtailed bus service in recent years.

The shortage of bus drivers that intensified during the pandemic appears to have become a persistent problem for schools. The yellow school bus, once an American staple for shuttling kids from point A to point B and a tool that helped ensure equal access to schools, is now so hard to access that some parents are turning to rideshares and cutting back on work to get their kids to school. According to the Economic Policy Institute, the number of bus drivers declined by 15% between September 2019 and September 2023.

Thousands of students who need transportation will not have school buses this year. Many in Hawaii’s Central Oahu and East Hawaii Island were told they would not have school buses this fall, according to an announcement from the state Department of Education. The Houston Independent School District cut bus service to save the district $3 million during the 2024-25 school year. And Kentucky’s Jefferson County Board of Education cut bus routes for children who attend traditional and magnet schools in the state’s largest school district.

These districts are among many that have cut off children’s access to school buses in recent years.

Frustrated parents then had to look for other ways to get their children to school, such as taxi services, public transportation and carpooling.

Education experts are concerned about the long-term impact of poor or inadequate transportation on student attendance and learning outcomes.

Student learning suffers when school administrators cut bus routes because children miss class time, said Michael Gottfried, a University of Pennsylvania professor and applied economist who specializes in the economics of education and education policy. Chronic absenteeism nearly doubled from 15% to 26% between 2018 and 2023, according to a report from the American Enterprise Institute. Children are considered chronically absent if they miss 10% or more of the school year.

“Taking away a mechanism that actually gets kids to school is hugely problematic,” Gottfield said. “This could be a solution that all families can rely on during the absenteeism crisis.”

COVID-exacerbated problem leads to crisis Why is there a shortage of school bus drivers?

Parents struggle to find transportation

Families like that of Lichwick-Glesne are suffering the consequences of the loss of the bus service.

Until early August, Lichwick-Glesne said she often cried because she knew there was no school option for her son. She felt helpless because she has epilepsy and doesn’t have a driver’s license. She and her husband sometimes argued about the best solution for their son.

The family’s despair ended on Aug. 2 when they learned Laike had been accepted to another gifted school just a mile away. This school year, mother and son will only have to take one public bus to school, and they’re sleeping in longer and coming home earlier, Lichwick-Glesne said. They still don’t have access to a school bus, but she considers her family one of the lucky ones.

They love the old-fashioned approach, but “we have no choice because we lost the bus line,” she says.

Lichwick-Glesne’s frustration inspired her to join Chicago Parents for School Buses, an organization that works with Chicago public schools to find alternative forms of transportation for low-income families.

Paul Wargaski, another member of the parent group, has two children with autism spectrum disorder who attend magnet and specialized schools. The children qualify for the district’s school transportation. One of his children takes a carpool route to school, and the other child is picked up by a taxi company and chauffeured to school.

Until last year, both children went to school in a yellow school bus, together with many other students. He preferred that.

The new options work for his family, even though he had to cut back on his shifts at work last school year or adjust his schedule to be there for pick-ups and drop-offs. He craves the school bus option because it gave his kids a chance to socialize.

While parents in Chicago have since turned to alternative school options, families in New Jersey continue to resist their school district’s decision to cut routes due to budget cuts.

There are so few bus routes in Jefferson County Public Schools that a group of kids in the Louisville, Kentucky school district created a hip-hop video using their music program to ask school officials, “Where’s My Bus?” – the title of their viral video.

The district threatened to cut school bus access for Braylon Blocker, 12, and his classmates this year. School officials ultimately eliminated transportation for students at all but two magnet and traditional schools, and some children prefer to attend Academies of Louisville. The cuts were made because of a shortage of bus drivers, said Mark Hebert, a spokesman for Jefferson County Public Schools.

The threat of losing his transportation and the district’s busing cuts motivated Blocker to create the video with the hip-hop education program HHN2L and his fellow students. After the video took off, many people across the country shared stories with him and his fellow students about busing cuts in their districts, said NyRee Clayton-Taylor, a co-leader of HHN2L.

Blocker said he often hears other kids at school singing “Where My Bus At?” since the video became more popular. The way the song resonates makes Blocker feel pleased that he’s touched on something, but also disappointed, knowing that many children and their families across the country are dealing with the same issue.

“What I really want is for everyone to be able to take a bus and for parents to not have to worry about talking to their kids in the morning,” he said.

These schools in Central Indiana: Try out a ride-hailing app for some students

Data shows school bus service is declining across the country

The problem predates the pandemic, according to data analyzed by the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education. Yellow school bus service declined steadily from 2013 to 2019, according to data from School Bus Fleet.

During the 2019-2020 school year, many schools closed their doors after the COVID-19 pandemic hit, leaving school bus drivers without jobs and adequate pay. Many found other work when schools reopened. Since then, the driver shortage has reached crisis levels, according to national data showing a decline between 2019 and 2023.

Employment and hiring of school bus drivers never fully recovered. According to a USA Today analysis, every state had at least one major shortage of school bus drivers last year.

How did we get to this point?

According to a Smithsonian report, school buses became a permanent part of the education system when schools were consolidated from single-room schoolhouses to larger buildings that could accommodate more children in the 1900s.

After the Supreme Court outlawed segregation in public schools in Brown v. Board of Education, buses were used to desegregate schools and ensure that all children could attend their neighborhood school, said Paul Reville, a professor of education policy and administration at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Nowadays, only a small percentage of students can travel on a yellow bus.

Most schools prioritize school buses for homeless children and, in some cases, students with special needs. They are required to provide transportation to these children under federal law. Some states also require districts to provide transportation to children who live far from school.

The way districts are in some cases offering busing only to students who live far from their schools represents a shift from an era when desegregation was the priority, Reville said. This era of busing, he said, is partly the result of the increased movement toward school choice, along with driver shortages and budget decisions.

Innovative solutions: carpooling, ride sharing

Some school leaders and principals have made efforts to offer families alternatives, such as public transportation, car sharing and mileage reimbursements.

Hawaii has offered families mileage reimbursements for driving their children to school or carpooling with others, and offers them public transportation passes. The state’s governor has issued an emergency order allowing children to be transported to school in various types of vehicles and is pushing for relaxed certification requirements for bus drivers.

Chicago Public Schools will try another alternative: providing bus stops where groups of students can take buses. The “hub stop” program, which exists elsewhere in the U.S., will be rolled out in the fall, Barragan said.

More and more families are also paying for ride-sharing services, or carpooling. Districts — including those in Colorado, Florida and Indiana — have also turned to ride-sharing services to accommodate children who qualify for school transportation, at least since the pandemic.

Contact Kayla Jimenez at [email protected]. Follow her on X at @kaylajjimenez.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: What Happens When Schools Cut Buses?