Yes, please do. Homeschooling and private schooling are quite legal in Florida. The law says the state will provide free schooling for your child if you want it, not free transportation. You’re quite free to pay for private schooling or school her yourself if you’d prefer those options to obtaining transportation for her. Most school districts (I can’t speak to yours, of course) will even let you pay for transportation on their buses if you live outside their free busing zone. Don’t like the zone layout? Time to start going to those school board meetings.
It’s Florida. Walking distance doesn’t exist. There are no sidewalks in Florida except for a few blocks in whatever passes for “downtowns” in each town.
IIRC, the high point in Florida is partway up the side of a hill in Georgia.
Um…this is being done already. For example, my daughter’s school bus goes right in front of our house, but it has never stopped here. Instead, they designate one house on the street to be a bus stop, and all the kids meet there so the bus only has to stop once instead of three or four times. No, they don’t have to walk two miles to get there, but they do set the routes to be the most efficient they can. It used to be that the middle school bus didn’t come down our street at all and kids waited on the corner–it looks like that’s changed now that there are more kids on our street who are middle school age.
Back in Montana, I know that some of those farm kids had just as long a walk home from their bus stops as I had to school.
Okay, okay. Yes, I could homeschool, ride a bike, or launch her from a cannon. But in this day and time when both parents work, homeschooling is a burden.
I guess I’m getting at the point where it is considered a terrible burden to make someone get a free ID card to vote, yet no attention is paid to what amounts to a state mandate to incur a plethora of expenses to get your child to school…
Is paying for a special pickup an option? Or better yet, paying a neighbor to do the daily pickup?
We had a bus strike here and Kid Kalhoun’s buddy’s mom and I split the transportion during this months-long inconvenience. Gigantic pain in the ass, for sure. But we did it.
Minnesota, just under two miles, about half of it next to a frickin’ lake (you have no idea how cold it gets when the wind comes at you over a mile of frozen lake), no sidewalks. My family had one car for part of my childhood, which my dad used to travel out of state with.
If the windchill was too low, we stayed home.
(The nearest store was another half a mile past the school - we’d sometimes pick up milk for my mother and walk groceries back.)
I don’t understand what expenses are incurred by walking.
“The state” didn’t decide what is the appropriate geographic area for a family to take responsibility for their child’s transportation and which is the school’s (ie: the taxpayers’) burden. You and your neighbors did, in two ways: one, by voting or not voting for referendums to increase school money - money which is needed to pay for buses, and two, by running, voting, sitting and speaking before the school board when these things were last decided. You told Mr. Florida Bus Guy what areas of town to map a pick-up schedule for, based on distance and safety rules set by your school board.
Want free busing for all students? Then get out there the next time a referendum comes up for a vote and get people to vote for it. Talk to the school board, run for a seat, join the PTA. (You don’t have to be a parent of a student to join, did you know that?)
There is no Them here. Them is You. You made yourself this burden.
Here at FML Labs, we are working on the “Kid-a-pult” for people stuck exactly in your situation. Unfortunatly dues to several lawsuits and those PETA people ( I swear the pig was dead befopre we launched it… those people at the Jewish Cemetary entirely overreacted!)we are having trouble testing our current prototype.
I can offer you a seriously reduced rate if we can engage your child as a test subject in our mostly perfected current prototype. So far it works great, except for the parachute release.
We have the whole “range/distance” thing down… unless the wind is blowing.
Just think of how cool your kid will appear as s/he parachutes down onto the play ground every day! Well almost everyday… (the damn lawyers made me add that last part).
Regards
FML
That point isn’t lost on me, but aren’t you being overly broad? Isn’t this like someone complaining about the fact that same sex marriage is illegal in Florida, and you simply saying, “Well, it is your fault because you elected the state legislature that keeps it illegal.”?
The more local you get, the more apt the reasoning is. It’s hard to take responsibility for, say, who the President is, because the process to elect him is so convoluted and there are so many other people involved. Bring it in to the state level, and suddenly you’re much more personally responsible. Not that I’ll blame you for the state of gay marriage, in particular - IF you’ve been in frequent talks with your legislator, out gathering names for petitions, raising awareness of voting times and places and issues, etc. If not, quityerbitchin. Still, tens of thousands of other people also have a say, and you may not get your way a lot of the time. As long as you’re in the game, that’s cool.
But you know who votes for school board members? Other school board members, about 14 women (and one guy, there’s always one guy) on the PTA and the principals and superintendent of the schools. It’s really hard to get more local than a school board. (Condo association, maybe.) And, again, you have to get *involved *to have bitching rights. I’ve worked trying to get votes out for school referendums. And you know what? It totally sucks. You get doors slammed in your face - quite literally - and a lot of verbal abuse. And then, nine times out of ten, people don’t vote for it anyway so their precious taxes don’t go up, and then bitch that their school’s arts program is being cut for budget reasons. It sucks. But then it is them, not me. I did do everything I could to see it through, and got voted against anyway, and now there is a Them. But it’s still not the school or the state. It’s my neighbors.
Hey, we have more sidewalks than that!
The problem is that walking distance in Florida is the heat. Since we have a minimum of 10 months of Summer with Winter/Fall/Spring happening during the other two months and most of it being Spring which is still hot but with a slight breeze, most people cannot walk 2 miles in the middle of the day without having heat stroke.
The OP’s main problem here is trying to see any sense in the way government organizations (i.e. school boards) operate.
But if you’re looking for a serious solution maybe you could take someone’s suggestion of finding a car pool you can get your kid into and since you can’t drive maybe you could chip in gas money or trade favors like babysitting their kids on occasion (just set up some ground rules so you don’t have kids dumped at your door all the time)? The added benefit would be your kid could make some new friends
I think like George Carlin. I didn’t vote, so it’s not my fault. YOU elected these bozos. 
But, seriously, here the school board election is held when the primary or general election is held. So, you get a bajillion voters who are there to vote for McCain or Obama, who have never heard of any of the candidates. They vote for the one with the most pleasant name or the one who is from their hometown.
Well, you can either walk to school or run for the school board. When’s the next election?
I’m not. I have a car and a license and will drop her off at school. My question is an exercise in that the government has effectively mandated that I be able to afford some way of getting my daughter to the school.
I know that I could homeschool, but that is not practical as the wife and I both work.
When I was told this, it him me as far as the legal burden the government was placing on me, and the lack of appropriate outrage when compared to ID requirements for voting.
Paying $20 for a state issued ID card would disenfranchise millions according to the opponents. But if those same people had children, they would be required to arrange some type of transportation for their children to get to school. Required, as in, you go to jail if you don’t.
I’ve always thought of mandatory school attendance laws being a curiosity when balanced with personal freedom, but I had never considered the natural expenses which flow from them, and make those expenses a de facto requirement…
Well, transportation is the least of those. Someone hasn’t gotten their school supply list or school fees invoice yet, methinks! 
Oh, for the love of god. Human beings are sturdier than that. According to weather.com, the highest average temperature during the school year is 90 degrees in June. If you have a heart condition, yes that might be a problem. If you’re extremely old, that might be a problem. If you’re wearing a ski jacket, that might be a problem. But if the average person drinks some water, they can very easily walk two miles in 90 degree heat without any adverse effects.
SHIT!
That supply list is for another thread…
I’m already prime dickhead#1 at the school because when I went to register my daughter, I left work, got there at 11am and was told that registrations were only accepted after noon because “we need the mornings to catch up on our work.”
Well, I told her that I just left work, and that the application was already filled out and all I needed to do was to hand it to her, and as she was already standing there just to take it.
“But then I’ll have to enter it in the computer” she said like an 8 year old child. I laughed and dropped the application on the counter. “So you are going to be one of THOSE parents”, she said.
I said yes, and she processed the application, and gave me the supply list. I refuse to buy half of the shit. I pay enough property tax for schools that they can supply their own damn copier paper.
Wow, its amazing all those tourists do it every day at Disney World and Universal Studios.
Most people CAN and SHOULD be able to walk two miles in the heat. If you can’t you might qualify for transportation under the ADA.
You say you “pay enough in property taxes already,” but I’m not sure the evidence is with you. In terms of state and local tax burden, Florida is ranked 47 out of 50.
http://www.taxfoundation.org/taxdata/show/447.html
In terms of state policy, Florida has chosen to leave a lot to the market.