The yellow school bus – once a symbol of integration – is becoming a relic of another era.

(This story was updated to add new information.)

Before sunrise on school days, 7-year-old Laike Glesne used to lug his backpack from a Chicago public bus to a train and then a second train to get to his second grade classroom 20 miles south of his house.

During the two-hour commute last school year, Laike and his mother Marissa Lichwick-Glesne passed unhoused people sleeping in the streets and partiers heading home and angry people shouting expletives. The day would just be starting and the mother and son wouldn't return home until 7 p.m. – leaving him no time for after-school activities.

Lichwick-Glesne didn't know this morning commute would be their reality when she enrolled her son at Ted Lenart Regional Gifted Center, a school where high-achieving kids learn above grade level, in kindergarten. At the beginning of last school year, Chicago Public Schools announced it would suspend bus service for the 5,500 students who attend magnet and selective enrollment programs far from their homes, citing school bus driver shortages.

Lichwick-Glesne said she panicked and thought, "How am I going to get him to school?"

Chicago Public Schools doubled down on that decision this year along with many other districts across the country that have eliminated or trimmed bus services over the past several years.

The bus driver shortage that accelerated during the pandemic seems to have become an intractable problem for schools. The yellow school bus, once an American staple for getting kids from point A to point B and a tool that helped ensure equal access to schools, is now so difficult to access that some parents are using ride-sharing services, such as HopSkipDrive, and cutting back on work so they can get their kids to school. The number of bus drivers decreased by 15% between September 2019 and September 2023, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

Thousands of students who need transportation will be without school buses this year. Many in Hawaii's Central Oahu and East Hawaii Island were told they wouldn't have a school bus this fall, according to an announcement from the state's Department of Education. The Houston Independent School District cut bus services to save the school district $3 million during the 2024-25 school year. And the Jefferson County Board of Education in Kentucky eliminated bus routes for kids who attend traditional and magnet schools in the state's largest school district.

Those districts are among many that have severed kids' access to school buses in recent years.

In the aftermath, frustrated parents have had to find other means of getting their kids to school, including ride-sharing services, public transportation and carpools.

Education experts worry about the long-term impact of poor or patchy transportation on student attendance and learning outcomes.

Student learning suffers when school officials cut bus routes because kids miss instruction time, said Michael Gottfried, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and applied economist who is an expert in the economics of education and education policy. Chronic absenteeism nearly doubled from 15% to 26% between 2018 and 2023, according to a report from the American Enterprise Institute. Children are considered chronically absent if they miss 10% or more of the school year.

"Taking away a mechanism that actually gets kids to school is hugely problematic," Gottfield said. "This could be a solution all families could rely on during the absenteeism crisis."

Problem worsened by COVID now a crisis: Why is there a shortage of school bus drivers?

Parents scramble to find transportation

Families like Lichwick-Glesne's are facing the repercussions of bus service being eliminated.

Until early August, Lichwick-Glesne said she often cried knowing there wasn't a school-provided option for her son. She felt helpless because she has epilepsy and does not have a driver's license. She and her husband sometimes argued about the best solution for their son.

The family's despair ended on Aug. 2 when they heard Laike was accepted at another gifted school just a mile away. This school year, the mother and son only have to take one public bus to school, and they sleep in later and arrive home earlier, Lichwick-Glesne said. They still don't have access to a school bus, but she considers her family among the lucky ones.

They love the old school, but "we have no choice because we lost busing," she said.

Lichwick-Glesne's frustration inspired her to join Chicago Parents for School Buses, advocating for Chicago Public Schools to find transportation alternatives for low-income families.

Paul Wargaski, another member of the parents group, has two children on the autism spectrum who attend magnet and specialized schools. The kids qualify for the district's school-provided transportation. One of his children gets to school through a carpool route and the other child is picked up by a ride-sharing company and is transported by a driver to school.

Before last year, both kids went to school on a yellow school bus with many other students, which he preferred.

The new options work for his family even though last school year, he had to cut his shifts short at work or move around his schedule to be there for pick up and drop off. He yearns for the school bus option because it provided his kids an opportunity for socialization.

While parents in Chicago have moved on, using alternative options for school, New Jersey families have continued fighting their school district's decision to eliminate routes due to budget cuts.

Bus routes have gotten so sparse in Jefferson County Public Schools that a group ofkids in the Louisville, Kentucky, district created a hip-hop video with their music arts program to ask administrators "Where my bus at?" – the title of their viral video.

The district threatened to cut school bus access for Braylon Blocker, 12, and his schoolmates this year. In the end, school officials eliminated transportation for students at all but two magnet and traditional schools and some kids like attending Academies of Louisville. The cuts were made due to a shortage of bus drivers, said Mark Hebert, a spokesperson for Jefferson County Public Schools.

The threat of losing his transportation and the cuts to buses in the district motivated Blocker to create the video with the hip-hop education program HHN2L and his student peers. After the video took off, many people across the nation shared stories with him and his peers about bus cuts in their districts, said NyRee Clayton-Taylor, one of the leaders of HHN2L.

Blocker said he often hears other kids at school singing "Where my bus at?" since the video rose in popularity. The way the song resonates makes Blocker feel satisfied that he tapped into something but also disappointed, knowing how many kids and their families across the country face the same problem.

"What I really want to happen is that everyone can have a bus, and parents don't have to worry about talking to kids in the morning," he said.

These central Indiana schools are trying out a ride app for some students

School bus services are declining across the nation, data shows

The problem emerged before the pandemic, according to data analyzed by the U.S. Education Department's National Center for Education. Yellow school bus service steadily declined from 2013 to 2019, according to data from School Bus Fleet.

During the 2019-2020 school year, many schools closed after the COVID-19 pandemic hit, leaving school bus drivers without work and adequate pay. Many found other employment by the time schools opened. Since then, the lack of drivers has reached crisis levels, according to national data that shows a drop between 2019 to 2023.

Employment and hiring of school bus drivers never fully recovered. Every state last year saw at least one major school bus driver shortage, according to a USA TODAY analysis.

How did we get to this moment?

School buses became a staple around the time when schools consolidated from one-classroom schoolhouses to larger buildings that could accommodate more kids in the 1900s, according to an account by the Smithsonian.

After the Supreme Court outlawed segregation in public schools in Brown v. Board of Education, buses were used to desegregate schools and ensure all kids could get to their neighborhood school, said Paul Reville, a professor of educational policy and administration at the Harvard Graduate School Education.

Today, only a patchwork of students have the option to travel on a yellow bus.

Most schools prioritize school buses for kids experiencing homelessness and, in some cases, special needs students. They are obligated to provide transit to those kids under federal law. Some states also require districts to transport kids who live far from school.

The way districts provide buses in some cases only to students who live far from their schools represents a shift from an era when desegregation was the priority, Reville said. This era of buses, he said, is in part a result of the increased movement toward school choice along with drivers shortages and budget decisions.

Innovative solutions: carpools, ride-sharing

Some district leaders and principals have been rushing to provide families with alternatives, including public transportation, ride-sharing and mileage reimbursements.

Hawaii has offered families mileage reimbursements if they drive their kids to school or carpool with others and offering them public transportation passes. The state's governor made an emergency proclamation allowing kids to be transported to school in different types of vehicles and urging relaxed bus driver certification requirements.

Chicago Public Schools will try another alternative: offering bus stops where groups of students can access buses. The "hub stop" program, which exists elsewhere in the U.S., will roll out in the fall, Barragan said.

More families are also paying for ride-sharing services or carpooling. Districts – including those in Colorado, Florida and Indiana – have also turned to ride-sharing services to accommodate kids who qualify for school-provided transportation at least since the pandemic.

Contact Kayla Jimenez at [email protected]. Follow her on X at @kaylajjimenez.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: What happens when schools kill buses?