Transportation

Round-trip bus service to traditional public schools is free of charge in Wake County. Native North Carolinians might take the free school transportation for granted, but nationwide, free busing is not universal. In Orange County, CA, for example, a $335 “bus pass” is required if your child needs to ride the bus to a public school. And that fee pales in comparison with the fee in San Diego County, California, where the district charges $575 per year, per child. Massachusetts, Hawaii, and Colorado also have districts that levy substantial transportation fees.

Many Wake County parents take advantage of the free transportation option for their children because it’s efficient, safe, and reliable, and Wake County residents should appreciate the reduction in traffic jams that the buses produce.

Approximately 43% of students at WCPSS schools rode the school bus regularly during the 2017-18 school year, or more than 70,000 riders. To say that the free transportation option in Wake reduces morning traffic by 70,000 cars would be an exaggeration; siblings often attend the same schools, for example. But even if the impact on congestion and air pollution amounted to only 60,000 cars that weren’t clogging the streets near Wake’s schools, it’s easy to see that the district’s transportation services are a worthy investment.

Many students would simply miss school if they couldn’t take the bus because their parents don’t always have reliable transportation, and Wake County does not offer much in the way of public transportation. Absenteeism is, statistically speaking, a strong predictor of low test scores and an increased risk of eventually dropping out of high school.

Nationally, school systems are increasingly charging fees for transportation and for other services and equipment that were previously provided to students free of charge, such as sports, music, and art programs. The Pew Research Center reports that in most cases where districts no longer offer free busing to public schools, the problem can be traced to a budget shortfall that occurred after a state reduced the amount of money that it would spend on education. “When the budget hammer drops on pupil transportation, it’s usually children and their parents who take the hit,” says Mike Martin, the executive director of an association that represents school transportation heads, who spoke to Pew Research Center researchers in 2015.

Some painful budget cuts were required as a result of the 2018-19 WCPSS budget shortfall, and WCPSS has also struggled to hire enough qualified bus drivers in a tight labor market. So far, the district has managed to keep the same number of bus routes in 2018-19 as they had last year (745). (For comparison, the Raleigh News & Observer reports that the system reached a peak in the 2013-14 school year, with a whopping 928 bus routes.) However, WCPSS has also opened eight new schools over the past two school years, so by not adding buses and routes, they’ve increased crowding and wait times.

Some elementary students cannot leave school when the bell rings because they must wait 15 minutes or longer for their bus to arrive. These delays occur because of WCPSS’s money-saving strategy of using shared routes, where the same driver makes two trips to two different schools in the morning and afternoon. The buses also make fewer stops, requiring students to travel farther from their homes to catch their bus.

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools (CMS), the second-largest public-school district in NC, reports having over 100,000 daily bus riders, significantly more than WCPSS despite the larger district’s 14,000 or so additional students. It’s not farfetched to speculate that many more parents in Wake County would willingly forego the carpool lines each day if their students had a better way to get to school.

Yet many Wake families are not even offered the option to send their child to school on the school bus. For starters, a child who attends a magnet school is typically ineligible for transportation from the school district. An “express bus” that drops children off far from their homes at 2:30 in the afternoon is not a better option than the carpool line for most families. A bus with a shared route that must pick up high-school students at 6:15 am in order to complete a later elementary-school run is a similarly poor option. Students who must carry band instruments or sports equipment to school need to board the bus at a stop that’s within easy walking distance of their home.

As part of Wake’s attempts to reduce absenteeism, and as a benefit to the community in reducing congestion on the roads, WCPSS should add buses, routes, and stops to make the school transportation system more efficient and more accessible. But that’s unlikely to happen until the district receives significantly more funding from the state and county.