On a packed Maryland Transit Administration bus, an unassuming stranger with wire-rimmed glasses leaned against a pole next to Angie Castro, asking her increasingly invasive questions on her ride home from school.
“Do you have a boyfriend?” “Have you done things with him?”
The slight 15-year-old did her best to ignore the man and quickly jumped off the bus when she got to her stop.
He jumped off, too.
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“When I noticed he was following me, I started walking faster,” she said.
Angie took off running, clutching her phone in one hand as a friend listened to the scene unfold on the other end of the line. She ran down one street and then veered off in another direction, hoping to lose him. A backpack heavy with textbooks and a laptop bounced against her back.
Adrenaline flooded her body as she finally reached her back door and slammed it shut behind her.
“I think I could have gotten kidnapped,” Angie said.
Crisscrossing the city on public transit to get to and from school each day, Baltimore students have been followed, harassed, assaulted and held up at gunpoint.
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Youth from 11 to 18 were victims of 293 reported violent crimes and common assaults during school commuting hours in the 2024-25 school year, a Baltimore Banner analysis of Baltimore Police Department data found.
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The actual number is almost certainly higher. Many students don’t report crimes to police. Angie, who has experienced several incidents on her commutes, did not report the chase through her neighborhood.
Even if a student doesn’t become a victim, their commute forces them into situations where they may witness serious crimes and abhorrent behavior. Their travels are often long and arduous, taking them miles from home and dropping them at stops in unfamiliar neighborhoods.
Thousands of students needed to wait at stops where at least one violent crime was committed in the last three years during school commuting hours, a Banner analysis of routes home found.
The psychological trauma of that exposure can affect their ability to learn and make them anxious and on edge.
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The daily fear of riding a public bus or train to and from school can factor into major decisions about their education, including which school they attend and whether they participate in after-school activities that require a bus ride home in the dark. Researchers from the John Hopkins University have found students are more likely to skip school if they have to walk through or wait in dangerous areas to get there.
“This is something kids in Baltimore face and the ones outside of Baltimore don’t,” said Julia Burdick-Will, a sociology researcher and associate professor at Johns Hopkins. “I would be shocked if it doesn’t have significant consequences for their safety and their long-term outcomes.”
Baltimore City Public Schools is the only school system in the state that doesn’t offer yellow bus rides after fifth grade. Although city students have always ridden mass transit, the introduction of a system that gives students a choice of which middle and high school they attend has meant more students traveling longer distances, putting them in unfamiliar and sometimes high-crime areas.
Now, as many as 25,000 students travel an average of 40 minutes to school and 45 minutes home each day, a Baltimore Banner investigation found. Many have to transfer at least once.
Neither the school system nor MTA leaders said they are solely responsible for getting students to school and getting them there safely.
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The school system and city started to address the problem through an initiative called Safe Passage, which began this fall at 14 high schools. The program aims to keep students safe in the immediate area around schools at dismissal but not farther.
MTA officials say safety has improved dramatically in the last decade on their buses and trains. In addition, they say they are working with the school system and police agencies to make rides safer for everyone, including students.
The school system sees the current situation for students as unacceptable.
“The frightening and sometimes traumatic experiences our students face simply trying to get to school are deeply upsetting,” Baltimore City School CEO Sonja Santelises said. “Every child deserves to travel to and from school without fear of harm.”
Santelises said the school system would like to collaborate with transit and city officials, community members and law enforcement to do more.
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“Their safety — on school grounds and beyond — must be a shared priority,“ Santelises said.
When students choose safety over school
Burdick-Will set out in 2018 to measure how exposure to crime affected students’ attendance. She and colleague Marc Stein, at the time a Hopkins associate professor, found that students who walked through or waited on street corners with high violent crime rates during the 2014-15 school year missed more school than those who didn’t.
Students who lived in the same neighborhoods but attended different schools had different attendance patterns based on whether their commutes went through high-crime areas.
Angie, a junior at Digital Harbor High, has always felt uneasy transferring buses at the corner of Light and Pratt. One morning, she witnessed two people in ski masks attack another student at the downtown bus stop. They tripped the boy, felt around in his book bag and went through his pants pockets before “they brought him over to [broken] glass and dropped him on it.” The attack stopped only when a bystander intervened.
That stop was the site of four reported assaults and a robbery during students’ commuting hours from the 2022-23 to 2024-25 school years, according to the Banner‘s analysis.
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Angie now takes the bus home every day with two male classmates who live in East Baltimore. She said she would feel safer if the public buses she rides were for students only.
Students don’t have to be victims themselves, Burdick-Will said, to feel uneasy. Knowing other students who have been victims can be traumatizing as well.
“We don’t really think of [the commute] as part of the school day, but I think we should,” Burdick-Will said.
About half of all city students were chronically absent last year.
City Neighbors High School Principal Cheyanne Zahrt once paid for Uber rides for one student for nearly a year after a frightening encounter at a bus stop.
The girl dreaded a bus stop near Lexington Market after she had to use pepper spray to protect herself from a man who appeared to be homeless and high on drugs. When she told Zahrt she couldn’t continue coming to City Neighbors, the principal offered her free rides.
Her attendance and grades improved after the principal’s intervention, said the girl, whom The Banner is not identifying for safety reasons.
Also this year, Zahrt said, five boys who attend City Neighbors were robbed in separate incidents on their way home from school in October. Zahrt said the attackers usually followed the student onto a bus and pounced when they got off to transfer. The robbers usually said they were armed and demanded iPads, watches, cellphones or sneakers.
On some occasions, Zahrt said, the attackers forced students to unlock their phones so they could steal money from their mobile payment apps.
“They are getting robbed all over the city,” Zahrt said, and it’s been a problem for years. Several years ago, her students were targeted as they walked by themselves after school to bus stops. “They would get strong-arm robbed by two or three people, usually in a car, who would jump out, or they would just get followed,” she said. Over a period of months, about 20 students were jumped, according to the principal.
Zahrt pleaded for help in emails to her city council member, the police chief and the local police district. Police began patrolling the school’s neighborhood every day until the attacks stopped.
These types of crimes are so common that a reporter witnessed one outside Mergenthaler Vocational-Technical High School last spring.
In the early-morning quiet before the school doors opened, a boy sat at the bottom of a long set of steps on the side of the school.
A black car screeched to a halt in the middle of 35th Street, and three teenagers with black hoodies threw open the doors. In a clownish drama, one of the teenagers’ feet became entangled for a second in a blue tarp that fell out of the car’s back door as he sprinted to the school’s steps.
They surrounded the boy, told him they had a gun and demanded he turn over his headphones, then ran back to the car, which took off.
The boy, who declined to give his name at the time of the incident, said he didn’t know the people who robbed him, adding that he was shaken and called his mother afterward. He didn’t want to report the incident, but the reporter did. One teenager was charged.
Groups of riders gathered at bus stops can make them targets for violence. The majority of student riders must stand at a stop near where at least one violent crime has occurred.
Stops like Fayette Street and Highland Avenue near Patterson Park and North Avenue and Pennsylvania Avenue in Penn North serve more than 100 students each day. They have also been the site of more than 20 violent crimes during school commuting hours.
Hundreds of students may have to transfer at the city’s most dangerous bus stops
City middle and high school students wait at bus stops where a dozen or more violent crimes have been committed during school commuting hours.
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The 1,722 students at Digital Harbor High may take up to 187 unique routes coming home from school.
Of those,seven routes — which carry as many as 42 of the school's students — pass through 10 transfer points where crime rates are particularly elevated.
Unreported crimes
Many more incidents, including the one Angie described about the stranger who approached her on the bus, never reach the police. Federal research says about half of all crimes go unreported. Many students interviewed for this story did not report the crimes they described.
Angie’s experience as a freshman wasn’t the only time she was harassed. A man sitting beside her once put his elbow on her knee, pinning her down in the bus seat until she was able to wiggle free. Another time, a man grabbed her friend’s buttocks. And this spring, she said, a man grabbed her arm and tried to prevent her from getting off a bus.
In more than a dozen interviews, other girls described similar experiences of being approached by a stranger as they rode the bus, metro or light rail, followed as they walked along a sidewalk, and harassed by men who drove slowly alongside them and tried to convince them to get in their cars. Some girls carry pepper spray to protect themselves, even though they’d be disciplined if they’re caught with it at school.
They have come to accept the harassment as what they must endure to get an education.
MTA said serious incidents, what the FBI describes as Part 1 crimes, on their buses and trains have dropped 56% since 2014, when 285 incidents were reported. They reported 159 in 2024.
“Ongoing efforts to improve transit security are having a positive impact,” the MTA statement said.
Crime declined by 13% on MTA buses and trains this school year, The Banner’s analysis found. On 2024-25 school days through mid-April, there were 130 reported violent crimes, assaults, robberies and domestic violence incidents, though MTA Police data does not include details on the time of every incident or if victims were minors.
In the same period, crime data shows only six sex offenses were reported, far fewer than girls described as their common experience.
School police say that limited reporting makes it hard to understand just how often young women are being harassed.
“I can’t say it’s not happening,” Chief of School Police Jeffrey Shorter said. “If they don’t tell anybody, then there’s no way for us to know.”
Zahrt said some students don’t believe reporting crime will result in charges or prosecutions, particularly if it involves juveniles who often face lesser charges.
Angie’s sheltered life in a neat East Baltimore neighborhood of brick row houses meant she had little experience on transit before high school. Even in middle school, her mother didn’t let her go far. “The only reason I would go out was to go to school,” Angie said.
She suddenly had to become wary of everyone. Angie and her friends don’t often talk about their experiences, but they are always in the back of her mind.
Brooke Bourne, a Western High School senior, watched two men argue on a bus and then one stab the other. She broke down into tears when she got home. She sometimes has flashbacks about that day, she said, but tries to tamp down the image so it won’t control her thoughts.
That psychological trauma can have long-term consequences, said Nadine Finigan-Carr, executive director of the University of Maryland Baltimore Center for Violence Prevention.
“You have levels of fearfulness that cause them to be anxious when they get to school,” she said.
These experiences can cause immediate physical symptoms, such as a high heart rate and difficulty concentrating. Often, students aren’t immediately able to decompress or process what happened with an adult. Instead, they go right into a classroom where a teacher asks them to write an essay or do a complicated math problem.
These students might also withdraw or become hypersensitive, she said. They might become hostile when they are brushed up against in a hallway or tapped on the shoulder.
Even if not victimized, fear of violence can change a student’s educational experience, Finigan-Carr said.
Students may prioritize their safety over having an internship or a part-time job after school, reducing their chances of success later in life, she said.
It counteracts the reason they chose their long journeys to their preferred schools in the first place.
Difficult choices
Sometimes, after months of enduring a long or perilous commute, students give up on their first-choice schools.
A study by the Baltimore Education Research Consortium showed that ninth graders who transferred after their first semester were more apt to move to schools that were closer to home. Often, the schools they transferred to had not been among their top choices when they applied in eighth grade. The study concluded that safety concerns and the length of the trip to school were driving their decisions.
Angie could have attended Patterson High School, which is closer to home, but her family was nervous about sending her there because of violent incidents just outside the school grounds. They thought Digital Harbor High, in a wealthy area in Federal Hill, would be safe.
But that meant a longer commute with more transfers and exposure to potential dangers.
To get to school each day, Angie has to wait at stops that have been the site of 17 violent crimes during school hours since the 2022-23 school year.
School choice in Baltimore, Finigan-Carr said, offers academic benefits, but limited and unsafe transportation options are “punishing the youth for something that we as adults need to fix.”
In pursuit of safer journeys
After one of her students was shot outside of Paul Laurence Dunbar High School last fall, Principal Yetunde Reeves got immediate help. The district turned to the community organization We Our Us to find people to monitor school dismissal.
The group is part of the new Safe Passage program, an effort the school system adopted with $923,000 in funding from the Family League, a Baltimore nonprofit focused on education, maternal health and child welfare issues. As in similar programs in Chicago, Philadelphia and Washington, the idea was to improve the safety for students as they leave school and walk to bus stops.
Under the program, community organizations place adult safety monitors wearing bright orange vests near 14 high schools. Their presence is meant to discourage crime and make students feel safer, though they don’t necessarily intervene if an argument breaks out.
“We noticed attendance was dropping because young people weren’t feeling safe,” said Debra Y. Brooks, director of the Mayor’s Office of Children and Family Success.
Brooks and School Police Chief Shorter believe students previously afraid to report crime are reaching out to the adults from Safe Passage. After six months with Safe Passage, they say they are building relationships with students and making a difference, though it’s too early to see a substantive change in crime data.
“It’s working. It’s just not an overnight success, where you’re going to have immediate results,” Shorter said.
James Gaymon, one of the safety monitors at Dunbar, buys ice cream for the first five kids who make it to the truck after school.
“Kids will confide in you,” he said.
Reeves said the school hasn’t seen any incidents at dismissal recently and thinks Safe Passage is contributing, along with another key measure: buses coming right to Dunbar’s front doors.
About the same time as the fall shooting, two families told Reeves thieves had jumped and robbed their sons on their way home from school. They wanted solutions.
Reeves said she went to the school system’s central office and MTA after surveying students about which bus lines they were riding. By February, four buses were diverted slightly off their normal routes to pick up students at Dunbar. The buses depart every afternoon filled with students.
Together, the actions are working, Reeves said. “We don’t have a lot of kids hanging out as much as we did last year.”
Her students feel safer, she said, being picked up in front of the school rather than walking to a bus stop by themselves. And students who need to walk blocks have an adult looking out for them near the school.
But Safe Passage may only go so far.
The vast majority of the incidents that Safe Passage addresses are disagreements between students that escalate into violence after school, Shorter said, and not attacks by strangers.
MTA said it has taken steps, launching an anti-harassment campaign and a way to report it in 2022. The next year, MTA created an advisory youth council. In addition, it is developing an app that would allow riders to report security issues while they are riding transit. The Maryland General Assembly also created a rider code of conduct that MTA can use to ban violators.
However, the program doesn’t address the scope of the danger students told The Banner they feel during their routes to school.
Fleeing city schools
When Taneeka Bell’s children started taking MTA buses to school, she noticed a change in their behavior. They had been social, fun-loving kids who played outdoors and had lots of friends. Then her daughter began taking the bus home to Cherry Hill from the Baltimore Design School, in the city’s central arts district, and her son from Coppin Academy in West Baltimore.
Diamond, at age 13, had to change buses at Mondawmin station, one of the city’s busiest transit hubs. She saw guns come out of backpacks and frequent fights that made her run for safety, sometimes down the street or to the next bus stop. The busy transit hub has been the site of 12 assaults and robberies during students’ commuting hours since 2022.
The years riding public transit were traumatic for her children, Bell said. Fear permeated Diamond’s life, and she rarely left their house. “They don’t know what other people’s intentions are, so they choose to stay to themselves,” Bell said.
Bell eventually pulled her son from city schools and sent him to live with an aunt in Ellicott City to attend Mt. Hebron High School. She wanted to make sure he was going “down the right path.”
He rode a yellow bus to and from school each day. “He actually liked it. He looked forward to get on it every morning. It was calm,” his mother said.
Bell hopes to move to Howard County so that her daughter can attend high school there next year as well. Her move, she said, is the result of the city’s inability to provide safe, reliable transportation to school.
She was once so committed to the city schools that her children’s photographs were on a billboard advertising their Baltimore elementary school.
Now she wants to leave the city for their safety.
To learn more about our data analysis, visit our GitHub.
The spelling of Highland Avenue has been corrected. The story was also corrected to note that MTA created a youth advisory council.
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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