T
he COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent shortage of school bus drivers has mired school districts in chronic, desperate times and forced them to seek relief in extraor- dinary measures that have tested the resilience of staff,
drivers and students. Those measures have included operational adjustments such as changing bell times, eliminating routes, extending walking distances, doubling up on routes driven, and rotating schedules. There has also been a rise in the popularity of another option
that promises to make it easier for some student populations to be transported to classes and save school districts money in operational costs. More school districts are using their non-yellow bus fleets including SUVs, vans and sedans to transport smaller populations such as students who have disabilities and may live outside their boundaries and require special transportation arrangements, as according to their Individualized Education Programs, or stu- dents who are experiencing homelessness. School districts also have begun contracting more with transportation network companies (TNC) that specialize in indi- vidualized service with business models similar to those of Uber or Lyft and other alternative transportation companies (ATC). Three of these companies are TNC HopSkipDrive and ATCs Adroit Advanced Technologies and EverDriven. In these cases, as with district drivers who drive the non-yellow
vehicles, commercial driver’s licenses (CDL) are not required. School districts have also increasingly embraced Type A school buses for this very reason. But the smaller, non-yellow vehicles are providing even more cost efficiency when only one or two students require rides. They also have the flexibility to pick up students at home or from designated locations.
The Vendors’ View On its website, the U.S. Department of Education quotes an Edu-
cation Week Research Center survey released in October 2021 that found that 68 percent of the principals and district administrators surveyed said they lacked bus drivers. HopSkipDrive, which issued its own 2022 State of School Transportation Report, found that 53 percent of school districts said they use alternative solutions to meet some student transportation needs. Miriam Ravkin, HopSkipDrive’s senior vice president of mar-
keting, said there has been a definite uptick in demand for the company’s services, largely due to the fact that 88 percent of the survey respondents indicated their student transportation had been constrained by the bus driver shortage. “With the driver shortage exacerbated by COVID-19, HopSkip-
Drive has become a solution for more and more school districts across the country,” Ravkin said. “We currently have contracts with 400-plus school districts in 21 major markets across 12 states, most recently launching in Detroit, Michigan. In 2021, the total number of safe rides delivered through the HopSkipDrive platform more than doubled from the previous year.”
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