To answer some questions raised, my son goes to public school in a Boston suburb and uses a public bus, although they do get a reduced fare card. I don’t know the distance, but I have the impression it is a couple miles.
When I was in HS, we got three free latenesses after which you got a detention. Detention was pretty much a study hall, no big deal. I still recall being called down to the vice-principal’s office because he claimed I’d been late 4 times. I protested it was only three. With great glee he picked up the pile of slips and started counting one, two, three, and then his face collapsed in great disappointment because the fourth slip wasn’t mine, but a classmate’s who had the same last name.
I’ve been working in public schools for 15 years. There are a lot of lawsuits filed over things that happened on the ride to school. They may not blip your radar, but that’s because either the parents didn’t talk to the press about it or it wasn’t deemed newsworthy.
The problem with having students ue public transportation is it makes schools liable for incidents they have no control over. I have a relative who was working for a company that contracted with schools to provide buses and drivers. He lost his job a year or so ago because some of the schools they contracted with dropped their contracts over the liability/control issue. But he almost immediately got hired by the district to do the same job. Only now he’s an employee of the school rather than an employee of a contractor.
It’s going to depend on the district, but in mine it’s the majority. The students come from more than a ten mile radius. The area within walking distance is a small percentage of the area served.
The fact that a district is liable for the action of it’s contractor doesn’t mean they are liable for the actions of a public transit agency that they don’t have a contract with.
And in mine, no student must attend a school even five miles away. They don’t even have to attend the closest school - a kid could easily be the only one attending a particular school from their neighborhood.
Our district doesn’t have detention because it would interfere with too many after-school programs. Having kids miss out on enrichment programs as a form of discipline is not considered productive. In its place, we had something call ISS, which stands for In School Suspension. We had a room with an all day monitor who was assigned students who could not be in class nor have lunch with their peers. They were isolated for the day in the ISS room with assignments provided by their teachers. Unfortunately, due to complaints and political pressure, the ISS system was done away with at the beginning of the school year.
In its place, they decided to extend the PBIS behavioral model to include special events for students maintaining a high level of behavioral performance. This past Friday, there was a field trip for the entire school that included all students who have thus far met the PBIS standards. Those that didn’t were left behind with teachers left behind to monitor them. Of course, a number of parents showed up in the school office demanding to know why their little darlings were so cruelly left behind. They’ll probably cave to political pressure and get rid of this as well.
If the student (or parent) just decided to use public transportation instead of using the school’s transportation then no they wouldn’t be (although that wouldn’t necessarily stop the parents from filing a lawsuit that would cost the school some money even if it was thrown out.) But in that case anything that happened would be a risk that the student (or parent) willingly accepted, including being counted tardy if the bus was late.
But if it’s something like this:
Then the school would still be liable for getting the student to school safely.
I need to correct this. As it turns out, in my state city school districts are not required to provide transportation to students without disabilities and those that do are doing so voluntarily.
I rode the city bus to school from 6th to 10th grade (Cleveland, 1987 to 1991). We received paper bus passes in homeroom every week. Splitting them in half and gluing them to regular paper to double the amount of tickets was high level grade-school forgery that only a few in-demand students mastered. The school was within walking distance to downtown so we relished the after-school freedom that riding public transportation afforded us.