CHICAGO– Ishmael El-Amin was taking his daughter to school when a chance encounter gave him an idea for a new way of carpooling.
On their way through Chicago, El-Amin’s daughter spotted a classmate riding with her own father as they drove to their selective public school on the city’s north side. They drove along the same busy highway for forty minutes.
“They wave to each other in the back. I look at the father. The father looks at me. And I thought, parents can definitely be a resource for parents,” says El-Amin, who went on to found Piggyback Network, a service parents can use to book rides for their children.
Districts’ reliance on school buses has been decreasing for years difficulty finding drivers and more and more students go to schools far outside their neighborhood. As responsibility for transportation shifts to families, the question of how to replace the traditional yellow bus has become a pressing issue for some, and a spark for innovation.
State and local governments decide how widely school bus service is offered. There have been more and more cuts lately. According to a Federal Highway Administration, only about 28% of American students take a school bus questionnaire completed early last year. That’s down from about 36% in 2017.
Chicago public schools, the the fourth largest district in the countryhas significantly reduced bus transport in recent years. It still offers rides for disabled and homeless students, in accordance with a federal mandate, but most families are on their own. Only 17,000 of the district’s 325,000 students are eligible for school bus rides.
Last week, the school system launched a pilot program that will allow some students who attend out-of-area magnet schools or schools with selective enrollment to catch the bus at a nearby school’s “interchange stop.” The goal is to start rides for approximately 1,000 students by the end of the school year.
It’s not enough to make up for the lost service, said Erin Rose Schubert, a volunteer for the advocacy group CPS Parents for Buses.
“The people who had the money and the privilege could think of other situations, like rearranging their work schedules or public transportation,” she said. “People who didn’t have to take their children out of school.”
On Piggyback Network, parents can book a ride for their student online while another parent travels in the same direction. Rides cost about 80 cents per mile and drivers are compensated with credits they can use for their own children’s rides.
“It’s an opportunity for kids not to be late for school,” said 15-year-old Takia Phillips during a recent PiggyBack ride with El-Amin as the driver.
The company has organized a few hundred rides in its first year of operations in Chicago, and El-Amin has reached out to drivers for possible expansion into Virginia, North Carolina and Texas. It’s one of them several start-ups who have filled the void.
Unlike Piggyback Network, which connects parents, HopSkipDrive works directly with school districts to help students without reliable transportation. The company launched in Los Angeles a decade ago with three moms trying to coordinate school carpools and now supports about 600 school districts in 13 states.
Regulations prevent it from operating in some states, including Kentucky, where a group of students from Louisville has lobbied on the company’s behalf to change that.
After the district, bus service stopped for most traditional and magnet schools, the student group known as The Real Young Prodigys wrote a hip-hop song titled “Where My Bus At?” The song music video went viral on YouTube with lyrics like: “I’m a good kid. I also stay in class. Teachers want me to succeed, but I can’t go to school.”
“The bus driver shortage isn’t really going away,” said Joanna McFarland, CEO of HopSkipDrive. “This is a structural change in the sector that we must address seriously.”
HopSkipDrive was a welcome option for Reinya Gibson’s son, Jerren Samuel, who attends a small high school in Oakland, California. She said the school makes sure to meet his needs as a student with autism, but the district provided transportation because there is no bus service from their home in San Leandro.
“When I was growing up, people talked about kids on the short yellow buses. They were associated with a physical disability, and they were bullied or ridiculed,” said Gibson. “No one knows that this is support for Jerren, because he cannot use public transport.”
His mother’s encouragement helped Jerren overcome his fear of riding to school with a stranger.
“I felt really independent when I got in that car,” he said.
Companies that target children say they screen drivers more extensively, check their fingerprints and require them to have childcare or parenting experience. Drivers and children are often given passwords that must match, and parents can track their child’s whereabouts in real time through the apps.
Kango, a competitor to HopSkipDrive in California and Arizona, started as a free ride-sharing app similar to the PiggyBack Network and now contracts with school districts. Drivers are paid more than they normally would for Uber or Lyft, but there are often more demands, such as taking some students with disabilities to school, said Kango CEO Sara Schaer.
“This is not just a three-minute sidewalk-to-curb situation,” Schaer said. “You are responsible for taking that child to and from school. That’s not the same as transporting an adult or Dashing someone’s lunch or dinner.”
In Chicago, some families who used Piggyback said they had seen few alternatives.
Concerned about the city’s rising crime rate, retired police officer Sabrina Beck never considered letting her son take the subway to Whitney Young High School. Since she was driving him anyway, she volunteered through PiggyBack to also drive a freshman who had qualified for the selective magnet school but couldn’t get there.
“To have the opportunity to go and then miss it because you don’t have the transportation, that’s so damaging,” Beck said. “These types of options are extremely important.”
After the bus route that took her two children to elementary school was canceled, Jazmine Dillard and other Chicago parents thought they had convinced the school to move the opening bell from 8:45 a.m. to 8:15 a.m., a more manageable time for her. schedule. After that plan was scrapped because the buses were needed elsewhere at the time, Dillard turned to PiggyBack Network.
“We had to pivot a little bit and find a way to get to work on time and get them to school on time,” she said.
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