Baltimore’s decades-old struggle to get students to school on time could be solved with a network of yellow buses, vans and cars that would take 35,000 children to school in one safe and efficient trip.
The solution that school officials have long said would be financially infeasible in fact could cost as little as 5% of the district’s annual budget, according to a first-of-its-kind analysis for The Banner.
The school technology company HopSkipDrive, which has designed money-saving transportation systems in cities like Denver and Littleton, Colorado, used an unconventional bus-routing approach that accommodates students’ ability to choose their middle and high schools. School administrators have long cited that policy as the reason a bus system would be too unwieldy and expensive.
The Banner requested the company’s analysis following our investigation that found a quarter of public buses that students take to school show up late or not at all. As a result, students miss critical instruction time and too often fail their first-period classes. On their trips, students say they are sexually harassed and witness drug use, shootings and stabbings.
In Baltimore City Public Schools, yellow bus service stops after fifth grade, as universal school choice begins. Students can attend any middle or high school that suits them, a policy designed to give children a way out of poorly performing neighborhood schools.
But choice doesn’t come with a ride, an unquestioned right in every other Maryland district.
As a result, children as young as 11 crisscross the city on a public transit system so unreliable that it’s nearly impossible for them to get to class on time every day, regardless of how early they leave. Some settle for schools closer to home to avoid commutes that can last 90 minutes under the best circumstances.
In response to The Banner’s investigation, school officials said extending bus service to middle and high school students would be too expensive and blamed the underfunded Maryland Transit Administration. State transit officials, meanwhile, said the public bus system helps all residents and can’t be reconfigured solely to benefit students.
The HopSkipDrive analysis showed a way to solve this seemingly intractable issue. The consulting company used artificial intelligence and a proprietary modeling platform to devise a network of school buses, vans and cars that would traverse the city rather than circling neighborhoods as yellow buses traditionally do.
This system would cost about as much as a neighboring school system pays for its buses, no trip would take longer than an hour, and students would not change buses. That means no waiting on a street corner in an unfamiliar neighborhood to catch a connection.
School system leaders who reviewed HopSkipDrive’s analysis said they found parts of it promising.
“I think it is definitely worthy of further examination,” City Schools CEO Sonja Santelises said. “City students bear a disproportionate burden in getting to school regularly on time because of an inadequate transportation infrastructure.”
But school system leaders are reluctant to give up on public transit, which is free for students. They say there’s no money in the budget for more yellow buses.
Meanwhile, the MTA’s latest plan to make buses more frequent and reliable in Baltimore would take 10 years to finish, leaving another generation of students behind.
In Baltimore, school buses are a foreign culture
For city students, the concept of riding a yellow school bus is so foreign it’s difficult to grasp.
At Digital Harbor High School in South Baltimore, students seemed puzzled by the idea that a single yellow bus would leave their neighborhood at the same time every day. Could they just ride it some days? Would there be yellow buses to take them home if they stayed after school for sports?
Riding public transit, they’re accustomed to the freedom of stopping for breakfast at a fast-food restaurant as they transfer buses, or rolling over in bed some days to take a later bus.
Taking a dedicated yellow bus “would be a huge cultural shift” for students, said Digital’s principal, Mavis Jackson.
Yet for thousands of them, it would mean a trip without changing transit lines, a transfer that often goes awry. A Banner analysis found that students may wait 20 minutes for a connecting bus and often longer because so many buses run behind schedule.
Grace Nyembo, a junior at Digital, usually takes a bus, the subway and then another bus to get from her Park Heights home to school. The route should take 45 minutes, but delays often make it much longer. Her other option is the 94 bus, which winds its way to Fort Avenue, a five-minute walk from school, after an hour and more than 50 stops.
HopSkipDrive’s analysis would get her to class on a single 44-minute yellow bus ride with five stops in between.
HopSkipDrive’s analysis calls for 668 yellow buses, vans and cars to transport kindergartners through 12th graders, potentially making use of 360 vehicles the school system already operates. The fleet would pick up at 198 neighborhood stops, nearly all within a quarter mile of students’ homes.
Some of the routes would take students across town, snaking through a number of neighborhoods before students get to school, while others are more limited to one section of the city. The average trip would take 32 minutes — about eight minutes less than the typical student spends on the MTA.
Each bus route would carry an average of 53 students, but those students would not necessarily be on the bus at the same time; buses could stop at several schools and in many neighborhoods. The most cost-effective design would mix students of different grades and schools.
Grace, for example, would ride the bus with kids who attend Thomas Johnson Elementary/Middle School and Benjamin Franklin High. She’d arrive by 7:18 a.m., with enough time to settle in before the 7:30 morning bell. After dropping students off at Digital, her bus driver would take the remaining kids to their schools, which start later.
Twenty-nine bus routes would stop at Digital, getting as many as 91% of its students to its front doors in the half hour before the first bell.
When there aren’t enough students for a bus, the HopSkipDrive plan would use a van or car. The school system owns a number of vans already and could contract with HopSkipDrive or another company for the cars. The company vets drivers, conducting background checks and inspecting the individual’s car, to ensure student rides are safe.
HopSkipDrive devised the plan using anonymized data that shows the U.S. census tract where each student lives and the school they attend. The Banner obtained that data from Baltimore City Public Schools through a public records request. To operationalize the plan, the school system would need to provide HopSkipDrive with more data, such as students’ exact addresses. But the plan demonstrates that it’s possible to run a yellow bus system and maintain students’ ability to choose their middle and high schools.
29 bus routes could get students to Digital Harbor High with no transfers
Digital Harbor High students across Baltimore would share yellow buses with those who attend 21 other schools for the most efficient rides. Click to see which route could carry kids from your area to Digital in a single ride.
10 stops for pickups
60 students transported to Digital Harbor High
Three students transported to one other school
The analysis assumes about 75% of students beyond walking distance from school would take school buses, vans or cars. The others would be driven to school or take other modes of transportation.
The total cost of transportation for the school district — including the $54 million it spends now — would be between $85 million and $105 million, the company estimated.
Anne Arundel County, a school district with a similar number of students, spends about the same percentage of its operating budget on transportation.
City Schools could transport older and younger children together in buses, cars and vans for $85 million, HopSkipDrive estimated. If the school system preferred to use only buses and keep children separated by age, it would cost about $105 million.
The cost estimates do not include any fee that a company, like HopSkipDrive, would charge the school system to create a more detailed plan. HopSkipDrive said they usually charge an annual fee of less than $10 a student.
The estimates also do not include the purchase of buses or vans. HopSkipDrive assumes the school system would contract with a yellow bus company to cover the routes, as many school systems do in Maryland. Each route would cost about $125,000 a year, which would cover the drivers’ salaries, insurance and fuel.
Joanna McFarland, CEO and co-founder of HopSkipDrive, said she believes the benefits would outweigh the costs.
“I think you will see attendance across the board increase, certainly on-time arrival,” McFarland said.
Students say they often miss their first-period class because MTA buses are late and run so infrequently.
Getting up before sunrise to catch an earlier bus may not get them to school any sooner because their connecting bus still leaves at the same time. And if students do arrive early, they may have to stand out in the cold waiting for school doors to open.
Could Baltimore have its own yellow school buses?
Students miss more school in Baltimore than anywhere else in the state. Forty-six percent missed at least 18 days, or 10%, of last school year, which Maryland considers chronically absent. Those kids are less likely to graduate.
“If we had our school bus fleet, we would reduce our chronic absenteeism expeditiously and exponentially,” said Diamonté Brown, president of the Baltimore Teachers Union.
Students would spend less time commuting, get more sleep and feel safer if they traveled on yellow buses, she said. “I think school buses are definitely something the school district should look at.”
Many middle-class families with cars drive their children to school, but the poorest students often have no choice other than the MTA.
Madeleine Monson-Rosen, a Bard High School Early College teacher who often uses public transportation to get to school herself, said fixing the problem should be a priority, no matter the cost.
“There is no amount of money that is too much money to get our kids to school safely and on time,” she said.
Yellow buses are no silver bullet
Getting students to school on time has been a decades-long problem in Baltimore.
This year, for the first time, city and school officials acknowledged the need to find a solution, but they remain concerned about the cost.
“The current city school budget cannot sustain another $50 million of transportation,” Santelises said. However, she said the school system is trying to reduce what it spends on transporting students with special needs, by adding classes in schools closer to their homes and working with their families to determine if the students can safely use public transit.
With those cost savings, she said, the district could begin putting more students on yellow buses. “What is attractive to me is starting with the sections of the city with the least access,” she said, describing them as transportation deserts where students are so far away that “you wonder why they would even get up and go to school every day.”
Baltimore City school board Chair Robert Salley declined an interview request but said in a statement that the HopSkipDrive plan has “some encouraging elements.” He also said the board supports efforts to make transit work better for students.
Lynette Washington, City Schools’ chief operating officer, believes dedicated yellow buses could address concerns about student safety. “Are there pieces that we can pull out to say maybe this is something that we can viably consider because of the impact that it’s having on our children?” she asked.
She also wants to examine urban school districts that use yellow buses for portions of the city. In Denver, for instance, school buses loop through areas where public transit is scarce.
However, Washington said some components of the HopSkipDrive plan could be problematic.
For one, there is a nationwide shortage of school bus drivers. City Schools already operates 229 buses and 131 vans for elementary school and special education students, but the district needs many more drivers than vehicles to account for sick days and time off.
Parents would also object to high school students riding the same bus as grade schoolers. Deborah Demery, president of the PTA Council of Baltimore City, said parents would probably prefer their children to ride with others the same age.
“When you mix those grade levels together, there is a possibility of bullying and theft,” Demery said.
Grace, the Digital student, agreed.
A big sister to siblings in first and seventh grades, she said “not a single one would I trust with high schoolers. They think everything is funny,” including behavior that is bullying or hurtful to young children.
She said there should be separate buses for high schoolers.
Demery also worries about students who need to stay after school. Under the HopSkipDrive plan, they would have to do what they do today: take public buses and trains at night.
Why not fix the MTA?
Baltimore students have a litany of complaints about the MTA. They say buses are unreliable, the drivers can be rude and the app to track buses doesn’t function well. They also don’t feel safe on MTA buses.
Even so, a group of Digital students said yellow buses aren’t appealing. They like the freedom of riding the MTA and want the adults to fix it.
Valentina Rowell, a junior, believes technological fixes could keep buses on schedule. Grace thinks a police officer or security guard should ride each MTA bus.
Some education and transit advocates would also prefer fixes to Baltimore’s long-neglected transit system. That benefits everyone, they said, including students.
In June, the state proposed the ambitious $1.1 billion Bmore Bus plan, which would increase how often buses arrive on all MTA routes and add express routes. But current plans call for implementation over a decade. MTA Administrator Holly Arnold has said the agency would need to build a fifth bus depot to support a larger fleet.
Some state legislators, City Council members and education advocates are calling on Gov. Wes Moore to fund and accelerate the Bmore Bus plan.
In a statement, Brian O’Malley, president and CEO of the Central Maryland Transportation Alliance, called the plan “an opportunity to improve conditions for Baltimore City Schools students that we and Governor Moore should not let pass.”
Still, that plan would only partially solve the issues. Transit officials have said a federal regulation prevents them from operating routes exclusively for students, and that they must balance students’ needs with other riders’.
MTA officials said in a statement that they’re working on making trips safer for everyone through a new rider code of conduct, which can ban people for inappropriate behavior, and a new app where riders can report safety concerns.
An MTA spokesperson declined an interview request for Arnold. The agency declined to comment on the HopSkipDrive plan.
Most school systems in urban areas rely on mass transit to get their high schoolers to and from school, and Baltimore should be able to as well, said Roger Schulman, executive director of the Fund for Educational Excellence, a city nonprofit that has advocated for better student transportation.
City Schools shouldn’t have to bear the cost of yellow buses, he said. “I think we have to know how a school system that is facing financial strife in the near future will find $30 million.”
But, Schulman said, “I think we have to explore any option that improves the likelihood that kids get to school better than they can do it now.”
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.
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