Living Outside the Lines

A school is a special place full of unique children and adults. A common feeling among this group is one of perseverance because of the many challenges facing everyone involved in educating our youths. Teachers work for low wages and have geographic restrictions that makes their commute to and from work hard to even pay for. Children often live in single parent homes, split time between two separated parents living in different districts, or don’t have access to a bus route or any other means of transportation, and these are just the challenges many kids face before even getting to school.

If everyone could walk to school like they tend to do in all of the old movies, then the simple life would be a reality, but in big cities around the country this is just not the case. The School of Origin Act is a national regulation placed on schools; giving them the responsibility of paying for children's daily transportation to their school of origin. Meaning, if a child were to be in a family who lost a job and house and had to move in with grandma, who lives in another district, it is still the district's duty to provide that child with transportation to his/her school of origin. In each state across the country you have an average of over $100 million spent a year transporting these children to and from school daily.

The question that comes next, who is responsible for the transportation of these kids if school buses are not allowed to expand routes outside of district lines?

The question is still that… a question. In some states there are statewide RFPs (request for proposals) that issue awards to multiple transportation companies who would then be allowed to participate in these efforts. In other states the Department of Education maintains credentials and operational agreements with vendors to agree to certain terms. Then they can contract with any district that chooses to work with them. Finally, in all states, schools attempt to manage the problem to the best of their own ability without outside assistance from any vendors. These Districts buy “white fleets” of vehicles that they buy, maintain, provide insurance for and continue to staff in a high turnover role.

All of these processes worked for many years since their inception under the Reagan Administration. Then a transportation phenomenon known as 'Uber' hit the industry in the 2000's. While companies such as Uber and Lyft are extremely helpful for ad-hoc, on-demand trips, they are not built to enter the student transportation space. They do not provide insurance at all to drivers, let alone the $1 million incident liability, and $2 million aggregate required by most states. Furthermore, their “sign up today, drive tomorrow” model does not prove to be a realistic credentialing model for drivers that need level 1 FBI Finger Print Cards, drug screening, background checks, training and much more to be eligible to participate. However, even though these entities cannot enter this space, it has all but destroyed many of the companies that do or have historically tried to do so.

The cab and fixed fleet companies in America did this work for dozens of years as a complementary service to their core charter, but now their fleets are diminishing as average Americans have shifted to Uber and Lyft instead of cabs to get home or to and from airports. The fixed fleet companies now rely on government contracts like Medicare and Medicaid to remain viable and rarely have the capacity to individually satisfy educational accounts. They definitely are not expanding staff and bringing on additional HR experts to organize and maintain the credentialing of drivers. In a recent audit of cab providers in Phoenix, AZ I saw people on terror watch lists and sexual offender registries transporting children in their vehicles. All of these traditional models have now put school districts in a bind and our youth at risk who had grown reliant on these programs.

So, here is what we have said so far. There is a multi-billion dollar industry, impacting the lives of our most at-risk children who have been identified as such at a young age, being served by failing companies due to huge and game-changing industry players (Uber and Lyft), that are not prepared or interested in serving the transportation needs of this population of children. While all of this is going on, the adult workers who educate these children are also having a hard time even affording their own daily commute to schools.

Addressing these issues were some of the core reasons Trust-Ed was created. We work with those struggling school districts and their staff members. We put them in control of transporting at-risk youth with their own resources and eliminate the dependency on these struggling traditional transportation companies. The schools and the family members of the students feel better about their child’s safety and the reductions of late arrivals while district employees earn incremental income during their daily commute. The employees need to be at the schools the same time as students so its a obvious and natural fit. The school districts save transportation costs, and the employees benefit financially because the schools cycle 40% of the program's costs back to their own staff members as driver compensation. All of this is managed by the Trust-Ed technology that does all of the tedious work for you.