Every day when the first-period bell rings in middle and high schools across Baltimore, hundreds of students are missing from their seats. They trickle into class, one at a time or by the dozen. Sometimes teachers delay the most essential kernels of their lessons until the stragglers arrive.

The penalty for this tardiness is measured in lost minutes, hours and days of instruction that cascade into academic failures.

As many as 25,000 students rely on a public transit system that makes it nearly impossible for them to get to school on time every day, an investigation by The Baltimore Banner found. The city is the only place in Maryland where access to a car can determine academic success.

Baltimore City Public Schools doesn’t offer yellow school bus rides beyond fifth grade. As a result, children as young as 11 crisscross the city on long, often unpredictable journeys that begin in predawn darkness and end after dusk. They stand in drenching rain, endure sexual harassment from strangers and witness violent fights on buses.

Not having a safe, dependable ride to school is shaping students’ lives — and limiting their futures. It discourages them from attending their first-choice schools, and influences the colleges they aim to attend and the careers they train for.

The school system doesn’t collect data on how students get to school, so The Banner modeled their commutes based on where they live and the school they attend. We then tracked the location of every Maryland Transit Administration bus every five seconds, 20 hours a day, from the beginning of the school year through mid-January. Our analysis found that about 1 in 4 buses students try to board during their morning commutes won’t be on time or won’t show up at all. In the afternoon, service is worse.

When everything runs on time, the average city student’s trip to school on mass transit takes about 40 minutes, more than twice as long as neighboring Baltimore County students spend on yellow buses and longer than the average adult’s commute to work. Most students who use transit to get to school have to transfer from one bus or train line to another, our analysis found. When they miss a connection, they wait an average of 20 minutes — in many cases, 35 minutes — for the next bus to arrive.

It takes Brooke Bourne, 18, a senior at Western High School in North Baltimore, more than 90 minutes to get home from school each day on public transit, a distance that takes just 17 minutes by car. Every day feels like a gamble on what combination of bus, light rail and subway is the quickest route at that moment.

”It’s just a game of luck,” she said.

Students bear the cost of that game of chance. They have worse attendance, lower grades and higher course failure rates in first-period classes than the rest of the school day, according to school system data.

City students have ridden public transit for more than a century, but their commutes haven’t always been this long. In the last 20 years, Baltimore started allowing students to choose the middle and high school they want to attend, even if it’s miles across town.

But the lack of reliable transportation turns that choice into a false promise. Because many families of means drive their children, disadvantaged students rely most on public transit. Their school choice becomes a calculation: Are they willing to endure long, stress-filled journeys to get to the best school for them?

Neither MTA Administrator Holly Arnold nor Baltimore schools CEO Sonja Santelises believes this failure rests solely at their feet.

Because it receives federal grants, the MTA is prohibited from dedicating bus lines for students only, Arnold said, and must balance students’ needs with other riders’ needs.

Santelises said the school system bears some responsibility. But she hasn’t made the issue a priority in her nearly nine years at its helm. She noted that students in most major cities take mass transit to school with few issues and said Maryland’s subpar public transit system reflects the state’s attitude toward poor residents, who are more likely to ride it.

“I will not allow the state of Maryland to abdicate its historical decision to underinvest in a system of transportation that works for the entire public,” Santelises said. “There are other places that have made a different decision because they feel differently about public education.”

The current situation must change, said Roger Schulman, president of the nonprofit Fund for Educational Excellence, which has advocated for better student transportation.

“No one should think that it is OK,” he said. “If 1 out of every 4 mornings a person’s car wouldn’t start to drive to work, no one would consider that car functional or reliable.”

A game of luck

Brooke entered high school with ambitions to become a lawyer, propelled by a mother who pushed her to be an “academic superhero.” Getting a B on an assignment meant she had to work harder; a C was unacceptable.

She chose Western, a school with competitive entrance criteria that’s known for educating some of the city’s most successful women for more than a century. It offered Brooke an opportunity to be among a circle of high achievers aiming for the nation’s best colleges, and in her mother’s eyes, make connections that would improve her job prospects.

When she first started at Western, she said, “I was trying to be the best student I could be.” The little girl whose deepest feelings flowed out through writing became an athlete and leader. Since her junior year, she has been serving as president of the Associated Student Congress of Baltimore City, one of the top elected positions for students, earning praise from the school board for her work.

But her frustrating odyssey on public transit over the past 3 ½ school years has worn her down and narrowed her ambitions. From her house in the shadow of Johns Hopkins Hospital in East Baltimore, it takes about 50 minutes each morning to get to Western when the buses, light rail and subway are running on time. When they aren’t, the trip can be a nightmare.

Last school year, she said, she was often late for her first-period class, Advanced Placement English Language and Composition. Her teacher would give her the lesson slides, but she missed much of the class discussion and the chance to ask questions. She spent some nights studying English until midnight and still ended the year with a D, by far the lowest grade on her report card, she said.

Teachers and administrators don’t consider how infrequently transit runs when they tell students to get up earlier, Brooke said. When she tried catching a 6:30 a.m. bus, she ended up waiting 45 minutes for a connecting line, putting her at school at the same time as her usual 7:05 a.m. bus. Other routes would put her at school half an hour before the doors opened; in winter, that would mean waiting in the cold.

No teenager should be expected to take such extraordinary measures to get to school, said her mother, Tierra Bourne.

At first, Tierra thought her daughter was exaggerating the difficulty of the journey. Then she took the bus with her. It was exactly as bad as Brooke described.

“Looking at some of the things she had to endure, it became an issue,” Tierra Bourne said.

Brooke’s mother leaves for her job as the sun is rising and her father gets off work about 2 or 3 a.m., so neither of her parents can to take her to school. When Brooke’s grandfather moved nearby this year, he offered to drive her and her sister, a ninth grader at Baltimore Polytechnic Institute.

Brooke now has an A in her first-period class.

She still travels home on the bus every day, first meeting her sister, taking her home and then some days getting back on the bus to get to work serving dinner at a Roland Park retirement community by 4:30 p.m. On one December afternoon, two buses failed to stop for her and a group of students waiting across from Western. Those delays meant Brooke’s 5.5-mile ride home took 90 minutes.

Bus drivers’ failure to pick up students — sometimes because they’re already full, other times without a clear reason — is a recurring complaint at schools across the city. Arnold said the MTA takes the issue seriously and will discipline drivers who pass students at stops without cause.

Over time, Brooke has let go of her frustrations with transit and accepted she has no control over her schedule. “I can’t even be irritated about it because the bus driver doesn’t care about me,” she said. “I’m just a student at this point. All I can do is show up.”

Sometimes, though, she feels people don’t understand her struggles. Like many city school students, Brooke’s high school years were filled with personal challenges — a sports injury, deaths of loved ones and issues at home. The failure of transit became yet another barrier to performing well in school.

“Stuff keeps happening and happening and happening, but all I can do is just push through it,” she said. “No one cares about the perseverance I have.”

Now in her senior year, her goal of attending one of the nation’s most prestigious universities is replaced by the reality of her grades and attendance issues.

She’s still working hard, she said, and hoping the University of Maryland, College Park, or Howard, Morgan State or Stevenson universities will accept her.

Bad grades, worse attendance

Nowhere is the harm of a disjointed transportation system felt more than in first period, where citywide failure rates for high school classes are 6.6 percentage points higher than the average for the rest of the school day, according to data obtained from Baltimore City Public Schools through a public records request.

Paul Laurence Dunbar High School teacher Tim Faass struggled one year to teach an Advanced Placement Environmental Science class in first period. On many days, he said, he started with just three students in the room, so he’d wait 30 minutes, halfway through the class, for the rest to arrive before he covered the most critical material.

The lack of reliable transit, Faass said, was “the largest issue facing our class every day.”

City school attendance has been lower than the state average for years, and 49% of the system’s students are chronically absent — missing more than 10% of school days a year — the highest in the state. Santelises said recently that improving Baltimore’s transit would help.

In dozens of interviews, students told The Banner that unreliable transit and bad weather discourage them from attending school. Students said that if their bus is 30 or 40 minutes late, they sometimes give up and skip school that day.

Digital Harbor High School Principal Mavis Jackson meticulously tracks attendance. She doesn’t schedule science, foreign language or Advanced Placement classes for first period because they are more demanding and harder to catch up in. She pays her staff extra to open the South Baltimore building 45 minutes early to encourage students to take an earlier bus by offering a warm, dry place to wait. On rainy days, average attendance at her school drops from about 92% to as low as 77%.

Beyond the logistical nightmare, many students say the ride to school feels unsafe and starts too early, leaving them exhausted.

To be in their seats by a 7:30 a.m. bell, the average city student who relies on mass transit must leave their house by 6:30 a.m, a Banner analysis found. The earliest trips, beginning at the far edges of the city, start as early as 5:40 a.m.

Once on the buses, students describe being surrounded by marijuana smoke, sexually harassed and confronted by bizarre and frightening behaviors. One Bard High School Early College graduate, Troy Stull, described a man who sat down next to him and kept edging closer, dressed only in a T-shirt and a towel around his waist. Another day he saw a man waving a Styrofoam mannequin head on a stick. The man was singing to the head, which he had draped with a wig, and rubbing the stick over his genitals.

Those incidents, some education advocates believe, have academic consequences.

Students are experiencing “a ton of frustration and unreliability from the systems that are supposed to support them,” said Schulman, of the Fund for Educational Excellence. “We cannot be surprised that when they get to school they’re not quite ready to engage.”

An unpredictable journey

Cherry Hill

The alarms on A’Nya Lucas’ phone go off at 5, 5:15, 5:20 and 5:30 a.m., timed to constantly annoy her. By the last buzz she must be out of bed to feed her cat, get dressed and pack her bag for school.

A’Nya, 18, is out the door by 6:08 a.m. to catch her first bus. If she’s lucky, her commute will take slightly over an hour.

71 bus stop

A’Nya goes to Mergenthaler Vocational-Technical High School in Northeast Baltimore on the other side of the city. She might have transferred to a closer school, but she had made friends by the end of freshman year and started taking classes toward a pharmacy technician certificate, which could get her a decent-paying job right out of high school.

The first leg of her journey is about 25 minutes on the 71 bus, which is pretty reliable by Baltimore standards. It’s on time, give or take a few minutes, about 84% of the time.

Downtown Baltimore

Long before the sun has risen, A’Nya arrives at her first stop downtown, where she tries to grab breakfast at a Dunkin’ Donuts before walking a couple of blocks to wait where she can see the Silver and the Green line buses approach, boarding whichever comes first.

The connection is erratic. Sometimes two buses appear at once. Other times, she waits a half hour.

Silver line northbound

Now a senior, A’Nya’s more consistently on time this school year, but she has struggled with attendance during high school. Some days she wouldn’t get up on time and would think the commute wasn’t worth it. Other days, she said the buses would be so late that she would give up and go home.

Her final bus drops her at 35th Street and the Alameda at 7:20 a.m.

Mervo High School

A’Nya has just enough time to walk a few blocks and get through the metal detectors at the door before the first bell at 7:45 a.m.

The time between her first alarm and her first period class is nearly 3 hours. “I am not very present in first period. I am there, but I am tired,” she said.

She won’t get back home until 6 or 7 p.m. and will have just two hours before she goes to sleep.

The perfect storm

Generations of city public school students rode transit with relative ease from the 1920s to the 1960s, when Baltimore’s dense population swelled. Students hopped on streetcars that ran every two or three minutes and were never more than a few minutes’ walk away. Buses replaced streetcars in the 1960s and over the decades, the number of bus lines decreased as people migrated to the suburbs.

Things changed dramatically starting in 2005, when the district moved away from a system in which students attended high schools close to their homes and instead offered them the ability to apply to any school in the city. Middle school choice followed in 2010.

Suddenly, students were traveling to schools across the city, but city leaders gave little consideration to changing the transportation system.

Just as students began relying more on the MTA, the service began declining. The number of miles that Baltimore’s transit covered each year dropped from 2016 to 2023, according to the Central Maryland Transportation Alliance. Baltimore now has the second-longest transit commute time of any similarly sized city in the country, a study it commissioned showed. The Transportation Alliance gave the MTA a D-plus grade for reliability because it ranks in the bottom third of its peer cities nationally.

Arnold, the MTA administrator, acknowledges that the agency’s performance is not optimal because of longtime disinvestment in public transit, but she said she is trying to make improvements.

Meanwhile, since 2010 families have been migrating away from the city’s core neighborhoods with the greatest concentration of transit and toward the edges, according to an analysis of U.S. Census data by The Banner.

As families were moving, the school system was making other major changes. City school leaders broke up many large comprehensive high schools and allowed dozens of charter schools to open. Schools aren’t dispersed evenly around the city, and many aren’t where students now live.

Today, their routes to school are longer and more complicated. Fifty-eight percent of trips to school involve transferring from one line to another. That means one late bus can prevent a student from catching a connecting bus.

MTA buses come on average every 20 minutes, and it is not unusual for them to arrive every 35 minutes, The Banner’s analysis found. Ideally, that time would be closer to 10 minutes, said Candace Brakewood, an associate professor and transit researcher at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

To make matters worse, sometimes buses get delayed in traffic and two come at the same time. Then students may wait twice as long for the next bus.

Students complain that they can’t trust transit apps, which often tell them a bus is minutes away when it’s not. That’s in part because about 1 in 10 scheduled buses do not share a live location, The Banner’s analysis found.

That analysis also showed 1 out of every 4 morning buses don’t arrive on time by MTA’s standard. The agency considers its buses on time if they stop within a nine-minute window of their scheduled time — two minutes early to seven minutes late.

While there’s no national standard, it’s more common for large urban transit agencies — like the New York City transit system, for example — to define “on time” as up to one minute early and five minutes late. By that measure, only 62% of Baltimore buses are on time during students’ morning commutes; it’s 52% in the afternoon.

Certain bus lines are more problematic than others. On the No. 22 line, for example, only 56% of morning buses arrive between 1 minute early and 5 minutes late, The Banner’s analysis found. As many as 3,300 students who attend 33 different schools may ride that line for at least part of their journey.

And students at certain schools are more likely to face tough commutes. At least four of the city’s largest high schools don’t have enough buses that stop nearby to get all their transit-eligible kids there in the 30 minutes before the first bell.

Digital Harbor, for instance, enrolls more than 1,500 kids who don’t live close enough to walk. The 20 buses, on average, that stop within half a mile of the school each morning can only fit 1,200 kids — and that’s if no one but students ride them.

MTA officials said some of The Banner’s estimates don’t reflect how many people are actually riding their buses. The agency uses bus sensors and cellphone data to count passengers, who number hundreds lower on some lines.

The Banner’s analysis, however, uses the same logic as county school systems when they map out their yellow bus routes: There should be room for every student who doesn’t live within walking distance, even if they end up finding another way to school.

A national outlier

Few U.S. cities suffer the dual problems Baltimore students face: a poorly functioning transit system and no dedicated school buses past elementary school.

In Chicago, Washington, D.C., and New York City, students ride mass transit to the school of their choosing, but those systems are far more extensive and considered more reliable than Baltimore’s.

In some big cities, like Chicago, some middle schoolers are given rides on yellow buses.

And in places without reliable public transportation, school officials have sometimes supplemented the mass transit system. In Denver, yellow buses loop through areas where transit is scarce. In New Orleans, where there is school choice and limited public transit, schools are required to provide transportation.

Detroit — which has school choice and unreliable transit, as well as high populations of Black students and economically disadvantaged students — may offer the closest comparison to Baltimore, said Sarah Lenhoff, a transit researcher and associate professor at Wayne State University.

“Students are offered this option of riding public transit, but yet that system is not set up to serve them,” she said.

Her study in Detroit showed that three-quarters of families had given up on transit and were driving their children to school, some in borrowed cars. More students were getting to school on ride-hailing services than on public transit.

“If you have a school system that is asking parents to do the work to find the good school for a child,” she said, “then we have to provide transportation for them to get there.”

Sam Speroni, a transit researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that Maryland was the only one of 10 states he studied that allowed local school districts to decide whether to provide transportation.

Baltimore stands alone in its choice. The district transports its elementary schoolers, along with special education and homeless students as required by federal law.

Baltimore County’s school system operates a fleet of about 1,000 yellow buses — larger than MTA’s 800-bus fleet — that deliver 80,000 students every day. Anne Arundel County, with a school enrollment close in size to the city’s, spends about $48 million of its $1.5 billion budget to transport its general education students on yellow buses.

Anne Arundel also provides yellow buses for students to attend magnet schools, no matter where they live.

A two-tiered system

Every day a van of 20 students leaves Federal Hill, one of the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods, headed to Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, a premier high school a 23-minute drive away. Their families pay $350 a month to avoid an unpredictable 45-minute trek on the MTA.

“We knew that this was way cheaper than private school, and we love Poly,” said parent Wendy Muher. “I am aware that not everyone can do this.”

Across the city, parents and students have resorted to a variety of alternatives to public transit. Students arrive by scooter, bike, Uber and private cars.

Some years ago, the principal of Green Street Academy bought an old, faded minivan and drove around to several MTA bus stops every morning picking up her students. “Not only did you see a change in grades, but a change in their emotional well-being,” said Crystal Harden-Lindsey, who led the school before she left in 2022.

Some parents said they moved out of the city or wanted to, unwilling to subject their children to the commutes.

Kristen Lewis used to pay $150 a week for her son’s charter school van to pick him up. She has never been able to drive him to school because she has to leave early for her health care job in Annapolis.

This year, they picked Coppin Academy High School, a small school on the other side of the city, where if he kept his grades up he could earn an associate’s degree by the time he gets his diploma, saving the family two years of college tuition.

But just a few months into his freshman year, he was late to school about half the time and his grades were suffering, worrying his mother. Kaleb adjusted his schedule and is now taking a 6:30 a.m. bus so he can make it to his 8:20 a.m. first period. He waits outside in the cold sometimes as long as 30 minutes before the school doors open.

Baltimore is the only place in Maryland where a parent with a car and a flexible work schedule — or the income to pay for a private driver — are necessary in order to get to school on time consistently.

Santelises acknowledged the inequity in the system. “Choice disproportionately impacts those with the least resources,” she said.

A quarter of Baltimore residents don’t own cars, according to the Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance. In areas like Southwest Baltimore and Cherry Hill, it’s closer to half.

The trip to school on public transit is on average four times longer than the same trip in a car, The Banner analysis found. The result is a two-tiered system that leaves those with the least resources with the longest commutes and, ultimately, the biggest barriers to academic success.

Jayzanay “Jazzy” Blessett had the brains and the grades to get into Baltimore City College, a selective public high school northeast of the city center. The school offered a debate team and the Advanced Placement classes she needed to improve her chances of getting into the Johns Hopkins University, where she’d always dreamed of attending. Tuition, room and board there is free for any city public school student whose family makes less than $80,000 a year.

She lived in far-east Baltimore near the Bayview Medical Center, however. A ride to City would take an hour one way on transit, a psychological hurdle for a teen who took buses to middle school and once witnessed a stabbing. “The fights and the violence and just the mean people … too much,” she said.

So Jazzy chose Patterson High School, just a 10-minute walk away but with fewer opportunities to take AP classes. Many were scheduled at the same time, so she convinced administrators to let her take AP English online, earning an A in the class. She will graduate with a 4.0 GPA, and has scored a 3 and a 4 on two AP exams — better than two-thirds of her peers locally and nationally. But, she’s only taken four AP classes, far fewer than other applicants to top-tier colleges.

In mid-December, Johns Hopkins rejected Jazzy’s application.

She has other options — she has been accepted to nine other less prestigious colleges, though none offer the kind of financial aid Hopkins would have.

Jazzy loves Patterson’s diverse immigrant community and its accepting culture, but she still questions the choice she made in eighth grade. “Sometimes I don’t feel like I made the right decision. It will always be like a constant conflict.”

Who’s to blame?

No agency claims full responsibility for getting Baltimore kids to school, and little effort has been made to understand the extent of the problem, leaving no one fully accountable.

No one knows how many of the roughly 25,000 students who are given free bus passes, called OneCards, are riding MTA. The bus drivers don’t require students to swipe their cards when they get on the bus, MTA officials said, because it would slow down boarding.

When asked who is ultimately responsible for getting students to school, Arnold, MTA’s top administrator, said, “I am not sure I am the right person to answer that question. We’re a public transit agency. We’re really focused on ensuring that all of our riders can get where they need to go safely, efficiently and reliably.”

Still, the MTA does reroute 185 buses to stop in front of schools when school is in session and has a full-time employee who coordinates with the school system to improve service for students. But the MTA can’t always accommodate last-minute changes to school start times or enrollment, the agency said in a statement.

Until 2019, city schools paid MTA for students’ free transit passes. The state has taken over that $5.6 million cost, but the school system hasn’t used that savings to help students get to school.

Transit experts say that yellow buses could supplement the MTA’s busiest lines, through neighborhoods where transit is scarce, or where wait times between buses are particularly long.

Santelises, the city schools CEO, said in an interview that she would be open to considering that option but that a full transition to school buses isn’t feasible.

“With the level of choice we have, the cost of yellow buses would blow up the budget,” she said.

She is trying to mitigate the problem by adding popular classes and programs to schools around the city, so that students don’t have to travel so far.

She hopes that someday parents will believe they have “a quality school option in every ZIP code.” That, she said, is fully the school system’s responsibility.

But those changes will take years.

In the meantime, no coalition of parents, students, legislators and school administrators has emerged to advocate for change. The Maryland State Department of Education hasn’t taken action, either. In a statement, the department suggested that students pick high schools closer to home and the city start school later.

Santelises said Baltimore’s situation would be viewed by the public as a “travesty“ in other cities where residents have higher expectations of their transit system.

“It would just be embarrassing,” she said. “It’s not embarrassing to anybody here.”

Just last school year, a Howard County school bus operator drew widespread outrage when it failed to pick up thousands of students. The superintendent apologized, elected officials got involved and staff worked furiously to solve the problem in a few weeks.

In Baltimore, there’s little outcry over the inequity baked into the system and no urgency to fix it.

That sends a message to students, one they internalize, said Bard High School English teacher Madeleine Monson-Rosen.

“When the bus doesn’t come,” she said, “what they learn is that Baltimore doesn’t care if they get to school.”

Baltimore Banner data intern Katrina Ventura contributed to data visualizations in this story.

For all of the details of our data analysis, visit our GitHub.

About the Education Hub

This reporting is part of The Banner’s Education Hub, community-funded journalism that provides parents with resources they need to make decisions about how their children learn. Read more.