Public school districts having to provide transportation for other schools hurts public school students

Obligatory school bus photo, from my recent vacation in Canada,
because, yes, I take photos of school buses even on vacation.

Making the rounds right now is this report in The Guardian from Ohio, which, like Massachusetts, requires that public school districts provide transportation to students within their bounds to private and charter school students in their bounds.¹

A shortage of drivers and buses combined with the threat of fines, means that public school districts in Dayton and around Ohio find themselves relegating their own students to the back of the transportation line.

“I’m going to have to use Uber, and it’s going to cost me $25-$30 a day to get to and from school,” says Castillo. “In wintertime, when demand is higher, it’s probably going to be more.” At 180 school days over the course of a year, that’s thousands of dollars he is set to fork out from his own pocket.

For the past several years, school administrators in Dayton, Cincinnati and elsewhere have been trying to get around the problem by issuing students with bus passes for public transportation.

But children riding public buses have reported being subjected to a variety of dangers. Public transportation administrators have also reported difficulties trying to serve the public and thousands of students all at once.

The situation came to a tragic head on the morning of 4 April when 18-year-old Alfred Hale III was shot dead at the public bus hub in downtown Dayton while en route to class at Dunbar high school. Shortly after Hale’s killing, Ohio lawmakers introduced a law making it illegal for Dayton public schools (DPS) to buy public bus vouchers for students.

The burden of getting children to school now falls on students’ parents, grandparents, local churches and charities, say officials. Families who choose to continue to have their students use public buses to get to and from school will have to fork out at least $540 per high school student a year.

The state's oversight of this has resulted not only in, as noted above, the fining, but also other legal action: 

Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost filed a lawsuit against Columbus City Schools in September, accusing the district of failing to fulfill its statutory transportation obligations. This lawsuit has added to the urgency for Ohio’s school districts, which are already contending with a shortage of qualified school bus drivers, to find solutions that will ensure the safety and punctuality of school transportation across the state.

Ohio, of course, is among the states that have vastly expanded vouchers to private schools using public dollars, something which was found (state) unconstitutional in state appeals' court last month. Adding that increase to what is already a transportation system that simply does not have enough staff is nuclear.

It being the district public school students who bear the brunt of this is not only in Ohio; in Massachusetts, state law requires:

In providing the transportation, the school committee shall accommodate the particular school day and school year of the charter school

...which means then that the schedules under the actual control of the district are what bears the burden. Similarly, charter transportation is to be provided "on similar terms and conditions as transportation is provided to students attending local district schools." Thus, all secondary students in Boston are provided passes to public transit; Worcester limits transportation at the secondary level to those outside of 2 miles from their school. 

It is, of course, city schools that particularly bear a burden on this, as they have the majority of the charter (and private) schools in the state and the students eligible for this benefit. They also are the districts which, despite state law requiring reimbursement², do not receive reimbursement for the transportation of most of their students. 

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¹ This is very much one of the weird ones where who the district is transporting has a limited amount to do with who is actually enrolled.
²Yes, of course, "subject to appropriation"