OPINION: Students can't learn if they can't get to school

For 36 of the first 40 days of school this year, I marked Sophia tardy. The kindergartener missed hours of critical practice in naming letters and recognizing sounds, foundational skills to becoming a fluent reader. It’s not that Sophia doesn’t want to come to school — she says school is the highlight of her week because she loves listening to books and helping others in math — or that her parents don’t value her education. Because of their jobs, they rely on a teenage aunt to get Sophia to school on time. And it’s not working.

As a Teach Plus New Mexico Policy fellow, I recently helped capture data and stories about attendance issues directly from New Mexico educators. Of the 500-plus responses from those working with students like Sophia across the state, over 150 identified transportation as one of, if not the, biggest barrier to student attendance. Issues included limited bus routes, students who didn’t want to ride the bus and funds for bus service.

Between 2019-2023, New Mexico’s chronic absenteeism, defined as missing 10+% of school days in a year and a contributing factor to adverse life outcomes, increased by 119%. Data from the 2023-2024 school year showed a 9% decrease in chronic absenteeism, likely due to initiatives like the BeHereNM Campaign. Addressing the transportation barrier to attendance is a powerful way to combat chronic absenteeism as research shows economically disadvantaged students are less likely to be chronically absent when eligible for district-provided transportation.

With approximately 166,000 New Mexico children riding the bus to school and many districts dealing with driver shortages, schools should optimize their routes to minimize time students spend on the bus and conserve resources. Recent studies at Dartmouth and a school district in Colorado showed ways to redo bus routes, making them more efficient, reducing the time students spend on the bus by 37%, and enabling routes to be covered by existing drivers. One educator who responded to our survey explained that their buses don’t have air conditioning or heating, so students are frequently absent in the summer and winter because they don’t want to take a long, uncomfortable bus ride. More efficient routes mean students would be more likely to come to school.

Meanwhile, students attending public charter schools like mine face significant issues just accessing a bus. The state’s current transportation allocation formula includes base allotments for all public school districts except charter schools, which also receive no funding for their first year offering transportation, meaning they frequently struggle to provide families with any options to get students to school. The over 30,000 students in New Mexico who attend a public charter school deserve adequate and equitable funding for their transportation. My charter school is only able to offer a single bus stop, meaning that families like Sophia’s, who do not live near it, have to find their own way to school. If we received funding to expand our bus route, Sophia would not have to rely on her teenage aunt for a ride.

Yesterday, Sophia was on time to school; attending her phonemic awareness lesson for the first day in weeks. She was overjoyed to identify a set of rhyming words on her third attempt. To help her and other New Mexican students struggling with academic outcomes because of transportation issues, we need to find and implement innovative solutions. It is what students like Sophia deserve to reach the future where their dreams await.