In the city that put America on wheels, basic transportation remains a pervasive challenge. One-third of residents don’t own cars. The Detroit Public Schools Community District provides only limited school bus service, and none at all to high school students, who instead get passes to ride city buses. Families in the city who choose charter schools, specialized “application” schools in the district, or other schools outside their neighborhoods often forgo their right to a school bus for their kids.

For large numbers of students, getting to school hinges on parents or family networks. Many more must rely on Detroit’s notoriously limited transit system, whose routes across the 143-square-mile city are designed to get people to job centers like hospitals and factories, not to school.

“Transportation is one of, if not the biggest barrier” to consistent student attendance in Detroit, said Sarah Lenhoff, a professor of education at Wayne State University and director of the Detroit Partnership for Education Equity and Research, which has published numerous studies of attendance barriers in Detroit. In interviews with Lenhoff’s team of researchers, Detroit parents reported that unreliable transportation prevented them from getting their children to school.

Pennia Anderson has spent years driving seven nephews, nieces and grandchildren to charter schools around Detroit.

“If something happens to the car, that kid’s not going to school,” she told Chalkbeat. “Who has money for an Uber?”

Lenhoff and other experts agree that transportation hurdles are not a root cause of chronic absenteeism. Rather, these hurdles amplify other drivers of absenteeism, such as housing instability, poverty, and chronic health problems, to make Detroit a “uniquely challenging context” for school attendance, Lenhoff’s group said in a 2019 report.

Read the full article about student transportation by Koby Levin at Chalkbeat.