Are school buses not a thing anymore? The suburb I grew up in definitely didn't have a remotely decent public transit system but the school district was required (along with all public school districts in the state of Texas IIRC) to provide a school bus that stopped within a few minutes' walk of every student's home (probably with exceptions for people who actually lived outside of the school boundaries and applied to transfer in). In high school, classes started after 9am and it all seemed to work just fine.