By JEFF McMURRAY and LINLEY SANDERS Associated Press
CHICAGO (AP) — When Elizabeth Rivera’s phone would ring during the overnight shift, it was usually because the bus didn’t show up again and one of her three kids needed a ride to school.
After leaving early from her job at a Houston-area Amazon warehouse several times, Rivera was devastated — but not surprised — when she was fired.
“Right now, I’m kind of depressed about it,” said Rivera, 42. “I’m depressed because of the simple fact that it’s kind of hard to find a job, and there’s bills I have to pay. But at the same time, the kids have to go to school.”
Rivera is far from the only parent forced to choose between their job and their kids’ education, according to a new poll conducted by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and HopSkipDrive, a company that relies on artificial intelligence and a network of drivers using their own vehicles to help school districts address transportation challenges.
Most parents drive their children to school, the survey found, and those responsibilities can have a major impact.
About one-third of parents say taking their kids to school has caused them to miss work, according to the poll. Roughly 3 in 10 say they’ve been prevented from seeking or taking work opportunities. And 11% say school transportation has even caused them to lose a job.
Mothers are especially likely to say school transportation needs have interfered with their jobs and opportunities.
Smaller paychecks, bigger vulnerability
The impact falls disproportionately on lower-income families.
Around 4 in 10 parents with a household income below $100,000 a year said they’ve missed work due to pick-up needs, compared with around 3 in 10 parents with a household income of $100,000 or more.
Meredyth Saieed and her two children, ages 7 and 10, used to live in a homeless shelter in North Carolina. Saieed said the kids’ father has been incarcerated since May.
Although the family qualified for government-paid transportation to school, Saieed said the kids would arrive far too early or leave too late under that system. So, she decided to drop them off and pick them up herself.
She had been working double shifts as a bartender and server at a French restaurant in Wilmington but lost that job due to repeatedly missing the dinner rush for pickups.
“Sometimes when you’ve got kids and you don’t have a village, you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do,” said Saieed, 30. “As a mom, you just find a way around it.”
The latest obstacle: a broken-down car. She couldn’t afford to repair it, so she sold it to a junk yard. She’s hoping this year the school will offer transportation that works better for her family.
Not all kids have access to a school bus
Although about half of parents living in rural areas and small towns say their kids still take a bus to school, that fell to about one-third of parents in urban areas.
A separate AP-NORC/HopSkipDrive survey of school administrators found that nearly half said school bus driver shortages were a “major problem” in their district.
Some school systems don’t offer bus service. In other cases, the available options don’t work for families.
The community in Long Island, New York, where police Officer Dorothy Criscuolo’s two children attend school provides bus service, but she doesn’t want them riding it because they’ve been diagnosed as neurodivergent.
“I can’t have my kids on a bus for 45 minutes, with all the screaming and yelling, and then expect them to be OK once they get to school, be regulated and learn,” said Criscuolo, 49. “I think it’s impossible.”
So Criscuolo drops them off, and her wife picks them up. It doesn’t interfere much with their work, but it does get in the way of Criscuolo’s sleep. Because her typical shift is 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. and her children start at different times at different schools, it’s not uncommon for her to get only three hours of sleep a day during the school year.
The transportation burden falls heavier on moms
Mothers are most often the ones driving their children to and from school, with 68% saying they typically take on this task, compared with 57% of fathers.
Most mothers, 55%, say they have missed work, have lost jobs or were kept from personal or professional opportunities because of school transportation needs, compared with 45% of dads.
Syrina Franklin says she didn’t have a choice. The father of her two high school-age children is deceased, so she has to take them and a 5-year-old grandson to different schools on Chicago’s South Side.
After she was late to work more than 10 times, she lost her job as a mail sorter at the post office and turned to driving for Uber and Instacart to make ends meet.
“Most of the kids, they have people that help out with dropping them off and picking them up,” said Franklin, 41. “They have their father, a grandmother, somebody in the family helps.”
When both parents are able to pitch in, school pickup and drop-off duties can be easier.
Computer programmer Jonathan Heiner takes his three kids to school in Bellbrook, Ohio, and his wife picks them up.
“We are definitely highly privileged because of the fact that I have a very flexible job and she’s a teacher, so she gets off when school gets out,” said Heiner, 45. “Not a lot of people have that.”
Parents want more options
Although the use of school buses has been declining for years across the U.S., many parents would like to see schools offer other options.
Roughly 4 in 10 parents said getting their kids to school would be “much easier” or “somewhat easier” if there were more school bus routes, school-arranged transportation services or improved pedestrian and bike infrastructure near school. Around a third cited a desire for earlier or later start times, or centralized pick-up and drop-off locations for school buses.
Joanna McFarland, the CEO and co-founder of HopSkipDrive, said districts need to reclaim the responsibility of making sure students have a ride to school.
“I don’t think the way to solve this is to ask parents to look for innovative ideas,” McFarland said. “I think we really need to come up with innovative ideas systematically and institutionally.”
In Houston, Rivera is waiting on a background check for another job. In the meantime, she’s found a new solution for her family’s school transportation needs.
Her 25-year-old daughter, who still works at Amazon on a day shift, has moved back into the home and is handling drop-offs for her three younger siblings.
“It’s going very well,” Rivera said.
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The AP-NORC poll of 838 U.S. adults who are parents of school-age children was conducted June 30-July 11, using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for adults overall is plus or minus 4.6 percentage points.
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Sanders reported from Washington.