Last year, Trisha’s morning commute was simple. She’d walk a few steps outside her door, wait with the other kids from her neighborhood, and then

The yellow school bus is in trouble

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2024-09-27 16:30:05

Last year, Trisha’s morning commute was simple. She’d walk a few steps outside her door, wait with the other kids from her neighborhood, and then hop on the yellow bus that took them all to school.

Trisha, now 11 and in sixth grade, enjoyed the ride to her school outside Houston, Texas. “I really liked how you could talk to your friends, and it was very easy getting to the bus because it was so close by,” she told me.

This year, because of budget cuts, her school district no longer provides bus service to students who live within two miles of their school. For Trisha, who lives 1.9 miles away, walking an hour by herself each way — in a place where temperatures topped 100 degrees the first week of school — wasn’t an option. Now, she has a long wait in the sun every afternoon as her parents slowly inch through an interminable line of cars to pick her up.

Her experience is part of a growing trend: the yellow school bus is becoming an endangered species as districts cut routes and more families drive their kids to school. In 2022, for the first time ever, the majority of American students got to school in a private car. In Chicago, bus service to magnet schools was canceled just before the 2023-24 school year began. And in Louisville, Kentucky, this year, students recorded a song to protest the disappearance of their bus routes.