ST. LOUIS — Martina Parker’s son did not make it home on time after the first day of school.
The cab driver who showed up that afternoon wasn’t the same person who’d driven him that morning.
“Out of his own safety, which is what I teach him, he said the driver was somebody different, so he didn’t want to ride back home with him,” she said. His father had to pick their 9-year-old up instead.
Her son is one of many students in the St. Louis Public School District who were assigned cabs, instead of a traditional yellow bus, to get to class. The district, like others across the country, is experiencing a bus driver shortage. The district’s main vendor decided last spring not to renew its contract, following a failed negotiation for more money to address wages and inflation. Since then, the district has scrambled to put together a new transportation plan. Without a single company to serve the thousands of students who need transportation, it turned to a mix of contractors, from school buses to cab services, some high school students, about 1,000, were instructed to take the city’s Metro bus system.
Days before classes began in August, one of the district’s bus contractors, which was expected to serve 1,000 children across 22 schools, backed out. The announcement added stress to an already busy time for parents and the districts.
Though Parker said some of the initial kinks started to work themselves out later that week, she said there were lapses in communication, such as the new cab driver not having her son’s address.
“It got better. The next day, I questioned the cab driver. I wanted to know his name. I made sure [my son] knew his name, the cab number,” she said, adding that the driver assured her that he would also be the same person who drove her son home in the afternoon.
Across the country, districts, parents and students are struggling with similar issues. While the number of bus drivers have increased since pandemic lows, employment has not fully recovered. An analysis from the Economic Policy Institute shows a 15 percent drop in school bus drivers employed in k-12 public schools from September 2019 to 2023. During that time, 1.4 million more students enrolled in public schools. School bus workers tend to be older and paid less than the average worker, EPI notes.
A spokesperson for the district told PBS News that it’s actively working to enhance its service to better serve families.
“This year, we implemented changes in our transportation model following an early termination of our contract with our previous vendor. Coupled with a nationwide bus driver shortage affecting districts across the country, these changes initially presented some difficulties. However, they have also driven us to innovate and strengthen our transportation system,” read an Sept. 19 statement. As of publishing time, the district had not responded to questions about how many students were using or affected by the new transportation services.
A little over a month into the school year, Parker is still seeing some challenges in St. Louis. In one instance, the cab did not show up at school. She had to leave work to get her son. Another time, the cab showed up an hour late due to traffic.
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These disruptions add up. On days she has to leave work, her work day is not over.
“I’m just taking another lunch break and then staying at work later to make up that time and be in the office or here at home working. I still have to make up that time,” she said.
School transportation disruptions are being felt outside St. Louis, or Missouri.
A vast majority — 92 percent — of school transportation and administration leaders reported having operations constrained by a bus driver shortage, according to a 2023 national survey conducted by HopSkipDrive, a rideshare company. That’s an increase from 88 percent in 2022, and 78 percent in 2021, underscoring how the shortages worsened past the pandemic’s early years.
Faced with these issues, respondents said they had reduced bus routes, broadened walking boundaries or adjusted school start and end times.
More than two-thirds said they’d turned to supplemental transportation, like cabs or private vehicles. The annual survey also said “not every student thrives on a yellow school bus,” adding that some students require a more individualized experience, like those with special needs, who along with homeless students are disproportionately affected by transportation gaps and challenges.
The report also suggests that barriers to transportation can affect a school’s absenteeism rates. Seventy-four percent of respondents it surveyed said they saw a correlation between transportation and attendance in their district.
Back in June, former St. Louis Public Schools Superintendent Keisha Scarlett told PBS News nearly half of the district’s more than 16,000 students are chronically absent.
“Forty percent of all public school students, on average, travel by bus to and from school, making up the largest mode of transportation used by students. The second largest category, at 33 percent, was students being dropped off or picked up by car,” said Lauren Gendill, policy analyst with the National Conference of State Legislatures.
At Meramec Elementary on St. Louis’ Southside, principal Heather Dunnavant-Cauley said the first week went “very smooth.” Dunnavant-Cauley, who is in her first year at the school, said the key has been staying in communication with parents, almost daily.
The first two days were jam-packed with logistics, she said. This involved contacting parents, making sure they knew when pick-up was, and connecting with the cab provider, making sure they knew the routes, and where to drop kids off and pick them up.
By the second week, Dunnavant-Cauley said the school switched from cabs to buses. About 18 students at her school rely on district transportation, buses or otherwise.
This was a district decision because “we weren’t utilizing the yellow buses as needed,” she said. “I don’t think that they needed as many cabs as they had before, and so they shifted my kids to buses.”
Julie Harpring lives one block out of the zone that would allow her kids to ride the bus to school.
Instead of driving her two children to school, they bike together to get to class.
“For us, it was pretty normal, and I feel like we are really, really lucky actually, that we have the resources and the time and the situation to make it work,” she said.
The family has an electric bike that has another space that fits both kids. Each day, they gear up and ride through a nearby park. Though the scenic ride takes fewer than 10 minutes, Harpring said she doesn’t feel comfortable letting her kids do it alone.
She said her heart goes out to all the parents who were confused about what was happening during that first week of school.
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More than one in three of parents and caregivers surveyed in the HopSkipDrive survey described figuring out their children’s schedules and transportation as “the most stressful part of the school year.”
Amanda Doyle, who has two children in the St. Louis public schools, decided to mostly pull her kids out of the transportation system.
She has a son in high school and a daughter in elementary school. This year, her daughter was assigned to a cab, which she was “leery” of at first, but after chatting with other parents who were familiar with the experience, she felt better.
Then, days before school began, her family was told that her daughter would be assigned a bus instead.
“The first couple of mornings we did not have a bus show up, which again, not necessarily out of the norm for the first day,” she said.
The family would try the buses again a few times after that instance. But by Labor Day, the parents decided it was time to use carpool as their main option.
“I think the district had a priority of getting more kids out of cabs and onto buses,” Doyle said. “But from a family standpoint, it felt like the way they did that was just cramming a million more kids onto the exact same buses and bus routes.”
Doyle’s son is still able to ride the bus for band, but she prefers to drive both her kids back and forth from school. Though she’s exhausted, Doyle knows there are parents in much more difficult spots.
“It’s a lot for me, and I feel really for other families in the district that just don’t have the same bandwidth. It must just be crushing,” she said.
Doyle said she doesn’t like to complain about the situation “because we love our kids’ schools and everything that happens in the classroom,” but these transportation challenges are “kind of this wrinkle that almost spoils the rest of the good because it’s at the beginning and the end of the day.”
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For the mother of two, it’s not about throwing “another arrow at the district” where schools and teachers particularly “have more than enough coming at them all the time.” It’s about expressing what it feels like for parents.
“All of this adds up in the day, and it’s just this added burden on families who may not have a lot of other choices as well,” she added.
For Martina Parker, everyone could offer one thing during these shortages.
“On both ends, I think that grace needs to be given more,” she said, adding that everyone is just doing the best they can.
“My hope is just that people will have a little bit more understanding to the different things that go into getting our kids to school every day and hoping that they show up back at home just as healthy and safe as they did when the left us,” she said.
