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Comment by throwaway287391 | Hacker News Reader

> Parents need to drop kids off before they start work.

I see a comment like this in all of these discussions and I'm always confused: did something change in the past ~15 years since I graduated from high school and school buses stopped being a thing? Where I grew up (Texas, which is generally not the most politically enthusiastic place when it comes to school funding) it was required that a school bus be available within a few minutes' walk of every student's home in the school zone. I thought this was a pretty universal part of American life based on every movie/TV show ever.

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I suspect HN skews Californian, and as a Californian with 4 kids, none of them have ever ridden a school bus.

In theory the secondary school kids can take the city bus, however to use my junior high kid as an example, that changes a sub 10-minute drive into a 20 minute walk that crosses a state highway plus a 20 minute bus ride, so what actually happens is the school parking lots all back up onto the local streets every morning as each parent drops their kid off at school.

Every other state has figured out how to have school buses. maybe California should figure out how to rise to the standard of everywhere else instead of insisting that the whole country manipulate their clocks so you can take the extreme inefficiency of driving your kids to school.

Working on it: https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/01/25/california-could-soon...

Note the 9% number...

Could also be more of an urban/rural divide? I grew up in part of California without a "city bus" for hundreds of miles, and school bus usage was pretty widespread. Parents who dropped their kids off usually just did so because it happened to line up with their schedule.

Also your post was a weird reminder of how laisse-faire my own upbringing was, because I was biking to school across and along a state highway in fifth grade.

Huh, interesting -- why doesn't California have school buses? I could imagine it might be hard/unsafe in dense urban areas like SF, but otherwise, why?

I don't know the full reasons, but after some reading: The really short answer is that it's not required by law, but it costs money.

Note that in California the overwhelming majority of schools have a budget that is essentially dictated by the state (the state makes up any shortfall in local taxes up to a certain amount adjusted per-student-day, and most schools are in districts that have such a shortfall). This means that there are only two ways to provide buses: charge students who ride buses (done in some districts) or take money out of the classrooms (not popular with parents nor teachers' unions).

Where I grew up there was a time when they needed to upgrade the bus fleet, so they passed a bond specifically for that purpose. If I understand the law correctly, this wouldn't be feasible in California outside of basic-aid districts (basic-aid districts are those that do not have a shortfall in their general funds, so they only get the "basic aid" for that is earmarked for special-ed &c.).

> Where I grew up there was a time when they needed to upgrade the bus fleet, so they passed a bond specifically for that purpose. If I understand the law correctly, this wouldn't be feasible in California outside of basic-aid districts

You misunderstand the law, all school districts in California can submit bonds to the voters of the district, and this is a routine method of addressing capital needs.

That's one of the things we get right because so many people around the state live in rural areas where school is a very long way from where they live. Many of them live on farms or ranches where their parents need those early hours to work and can't take their kids to school that far away easily.

Many parents don't trust their 5 year to get on the bus everyday. High school can surely be moved back for areas with 100% bus availability (my district has not had buses since covid), but elementary school would be a much tougher sell.

That's a fair point for kindergarteners, but by 1st or 2nd grade kids in my district walked to the bus stop on the corner all by themselves just fine. Also, my district had elementary school start the earliest (and middle/high school would start later) which for some reason is uncommon but makes a lot of sense for a whole bunch of reasons and would seem to mostly solve this problem for parents who need to walk their kindergartener to the bus stop before work.

People have faced legal issues for letting their 6 year old safely roam in my area. That may be crazy, but it's the reality in much of the US.

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