Study: Students Who Take the School Bus Less Likely to Be Absent
Although school buses reduce student absenteeism, some districts are cutting these services.
As many as 7.5 million U.S. school students miss one month or more each school year.
Regardless of children’s economic status or commute time, if they take the school bus, they are more likely to attend class.
Those are the results of a Brookings Institute study that has just been released. It compared the absenteeism rates of kindergarteners in the 2010-2011 school year who took the bus or got to school in any other way, such as being driven to campus by a parent. The study found that children who took the bus to school were three percentage points less likely to be chronically absent.
The study is timely in that some districts are now trying to relieve their budget shortfalls by cutting bus services.
Campus Safety magazine has previously reported on our nation’s school absenteeism issue. Each year in California, for example, about one million elementary school students are truant, and 250,000 miss 18 or more school days at a cost of $1.4 billion in lost funds to school districts in the state.
Nationally, as many of 5 million to 7.5 million K-12 students are missing one month or more each school year, according to Johns Hopkins University’s School of Education. The consequences of missing school are lower academic achievement and poor social development, among other things.
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About the Author
Robin Hattersley, Editor-in-Chief
Robin has been covering the security and campus law enforcement industries since 1998 and is a specialist in school, university and hospital security, public safety and emergency management, as well as emerging technologies and systems integration. She joined CS in 2005 and has authored award-winning editorial on campus law enforcement and security funding, officer recruitment and retention, access control, IP video, network integration, event management, crime trends, the Clery Act, Title IX compliance, sexual assault, dating abuse, emergency communications, incident management software and more. Robin has been featured on national and local media outlets and was formerly associate editor for the trade publication Security Sales & Integration. She obtained her undergraduate degree in history from California State University, Long Beach.
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