Florida’s Orange County Public School is navigating growth in some areas and declining enrollment in others.
ity. Avants said the district works with the California Highway Patrol to deliver its own driver training courses, recruits proactively and focuses on creating a positive work environment to keep its transportation team fully staffed. As the fleet has grown, the district has also shift- ed toward hiring more highly skilled mechanics, who can work across a wider variety of vehicles, including buses, vans and service vehicles. Clovis is also expand- ing its maintenance facility to create more space to regularly maintain and service its fleet.
The Charter and School Choice Factor But transportation growth can also occur where
enrollment is flat or declining. That is where the charter school and school choice conversation becomes most complicated. National Center for Education Statistics data show public charter school enrollment more than doubled from 1.8 million students in fall 2010 to 3.7 million in fall 2021, while traditional public school en- rollment declined by 4 percent during the same period. In the 2023-2024 school year, NCES reported 8,010 U.S. charter schools. That expansion can change transporta- tion expectations even where overall enrollment is flat. A 2020 EdChoice primer on school choice transporta- tion policy found that transportation can be a barrier to
families exercising school choice, because the existence of a charter, private or open-enrollment option does not mean students can safely and consistently reach it. The same report described a patchwork of state laws, noting that transportation funding or services were available for charter students in 31 states at the time, while 17 man- dated some form of transportation funding for charter school students roughly equivalent to public district school students. Tim Ammon of Ammon Consulting Group cautioned
that those laws may have changed in the years since the report, but the operational impacts remain similar. He said the effect of charter laws depends largely on
how they are written and whether districts are pressured to provide services they might not otherwise have to provide. Pennsylvania, he noted, has requirements for charter school transportation with certain distance lim- itations, while Ohio requires transportation to schools within the district. The Pennsylvania model may appear more challenging because it can require out-of-district transportation, but Ammon said the impact in Ohio can still be significant depending on how many charter schools a district must serve. The problem, he added, is when lawmakers expand transportation obligations without a matching fund-
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