Among the many crises facing the American education system, chronic absenteeism has perhaps become the most salient and complex. Unaddressed and unabated, chronic absenteeism renders attempts at addressing all other educational challenges futile.
The impacts of chronic absenteeism go far beyond academic performance—negatively impacting students’ opportunities to build friendships and become active in their communities, as well as missing out on resources and other educational system safety nets such as free meals and healthcare.
While potential solutions to the absenteeism crisis are varying and complex, perhaps the most basic is reimaging and optimizing the way we get kids to and from school. Plenty of research confirms the inextricable link between absenteeism rates and access to safe, reliable school transportation. In 2023, a survey of school administrators found that nearly three-quarters saw a correlation between access to transportation and school attendance.
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Researchers at Wayne State University reported that Detroit parents cited transportation as “by far the most frequent and pervasive barrier to attendance.” Another study by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania found that “children who took the school bus to kindergarten had fewer absent days over the school year and were less likely to be chronically absent compared with children who commuted to school in any other way.”
But if solving our chronic absentee challenges is as simple as increasing school bus service, why hasn’t that happened? As The Washington Post reported last year, chronic driver shortages, general budget constraints, increases in personal car ownership and usage and districts needing to reallocate school transportation expenditures to electrify fleets amid regulatory pressures are all making it difficult for schools to meet needs with school buses alone.
Despite these challenges, there are still several ways that districts can expand access to safe, reliable transportation and chip away at the chronic absenteeism crisis.
The first is to optimize existing routes using new technologies like AI. Despite facing many of the same challenges as other districts, including bus driver shortages and budget cuts, Colorado Springs’ District 11 was able to reroute their existing bus service using AI, cutting their total bus routes in half, doubling their bus utilization rate, increasing pay for their drivers, saving 40% in future capital cost projections and cutting their emissions by nearly a third.
The second is to focus on providing safe, reliable transportation options for students with the highest rates of absenteeism: those who are experiencing homelessness or in foster homes, live in poorer or rural communities far from their school or suffer from disabilities. Many of these student groups are entitled to transportation, but existing options can leave them waiting days, or weeks, for a ride. Focusing on transportation that can be set up quickly is imperative to ensure these students are attending school without interruption.
Particularly for students from low-income families, limited transportation options and distance from school can make getting to school more challenging, exacerbating existing social inequalities. Students from higher-income families are much more likely to be driven to school by a parent or guardian – or have families that own a vehicle in the first place. According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, 70% of children from low-income families rely on the school bus as their primary school transportation, while 50% of children living above the poverty line take a private vehicle. And while 99% of families living above the poverty line own at least one vehicle, 20% of low-income families own none.
In 2023, students experiencing homelessness reportedly faced the highest rates of chronic absenteeism. The uncertainty around where they may stay night-to-night presents a challenge around school bus routing and consistent transportation to school. Both our school system and the life circumstances our students deal with daily are growing more complex. To best support the most at-risk students, we must focus on designing transportation systems that are flexible and nimble enough to accommodate their needs.
The third is to seek out alternative solutions to fill the gaps left by buses. School districts across the country have had significant success deploying unique transportation solutions, particularly for students most at risk of absenteeism.
In Fresno, California, Fort Miller Middle School petitioned the school board to provide a van to supplement traditional forms of transportation and ensure that students get to school safely, which led to an average daily attendance increase of nearly 2 percentage points. In Riverside, California, the school district increased attendance rate for students living in foster care from 29% to 78.6% by using supplemental transportation solutions.
Many cities have opted to give students fare cards covering the cost of using public transportation to get to and from school, which has proven to be an effective alternative for older students living with easy access to those systems.
Other districts have petitioned their cities to make walking to school safer for kids who live nearby through installing new crosswalks, stop signs, bike lanes and speed bumps, for instance.
No transportation method is one-size-fits-all. But by offering their students a variety of ways to get to school, school districts can take great strides in closing the gap and minimizing chronic absenteeism.
