Amid school bus driver shortages and budget shortfalls, parents, students, and educators face a range of challenges, a new Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research survey finds.

HopSkipDrive, a technology company focused on addressing school transportation issues, partnered with AP-NORC to improve the methodology for its annual State of School Transportation report.

Our collaboration allowed us to combine AP-NORC’s survey and journalism expertise with HopSkipDrive’s extensive knowledge of school transportation challenges. Using AmeriSpeak^®, NORC’s probability-based panel, the team surveyed 838 parents of K-12 students to complement a separate survey of 510 school administrators, creating a comprehensive dual-perspective examination of school transportation issues.

“The partnership with HopSkipDrive, which deals with these issues day in and day out, was valuable,” said Semilla Stripp, a research scientist in The AP-NORC Center. “It helped ensure we were collecting the right data to tell the full story of the school transportation challenges that parents and administrators face.”

Using AmeriSpeak allowed us to rapidly collect high-quality data on parents’ views, which would have been challenging through other methods. We completed data collection from 838 parents in less than five days, allowing confident reporting on subgroups while maintaining statistical rigor. This reliability freed us to focus on the more complex administrator survey, which required supplementing an education marketing database with additional vendor contacts to reach target sample sizes.

The dual-survey approach revealed striking parallels between administrator respondents’ concerns and parent experiences. While 83 percent of the school administrator respondents report that teachers and staff take time away from core duties for transportation issues, about 3 in 10 parents have missed work or been prevented from taking personal or work opportunities, and 11 percent report job loss due to transportation responsibilities.

The study showed that women are significantly more likely than men to report being prevented from pursuing work opportunities (33 percent vs. 23 percent) or personal opportunities (37 percent vs. 23 percent) due to child transportation responsibilities.

We also found that 20 percent of women without a college degree report having lost a job due to transportation responsibilities, compared to 2 percent of women with a college degree.

“I was not expecting to see it so starkly in our data that mothers are impacted much more professionally than fathers are because they have to take their kids to school,” Stripp said. “This is a big stress point for parents.”

The research identified transportation as a widespread issue affecting lower- and middle-income families. Lower- and middle-income families were more likely to cite transportation availability and costs as barriers, while expressing more interest in additional school services if transportation were available.