Transportation, Students' Rights to

Basic Requirements

Public school officials must sort through a seemingly endless array of state and federal statutes, rules, and regulations to arrange transportation for all categories of students designated by state statutes, as well as categories mandated by federal law and court judicial orders. For typical administrators, this range includes students who reside farther than the maximum walking distance, students from nonpublic schools who travel to schools within or outside of their districts, students with disabilities (as noted above), and students going to and from extra and cocurricular activities. In addition to scheduling issues, school officials may be called on to provide transportation to groups for which no state reimbursement is available.

Absent legislative or judicial mandates to provide student transportation, local school boards are free to decide whether to furnish transportation or to charge for making it available. Generally, if the provision of student transportation is truly optional, litigation seeking to force boards to provide service will fail either because the state has declared no clear legislative intent to provide transportation or because a state's constitution, legislature, or courts have declared no fundamental constitutional right to an education. In its only case on point, Kadrmas v. Dickinson Public Schools (1988), the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the imposition of a fee to transport a student to school. Even so, previously, the Supreme Court of Utah permitted students to be transported at district expense if their presence was required in school-related activities (Beard v. Board of Education of North Summit, 1932). The court made a distinction between those who were participants in the extracurricular activities and those who were spectators. At the same time, the court added that the board could not at district expense furnish transportation to spectators of school activities. Subsequently, an appellate court in California found that a board's refusal to provide transportation for indigent students was an abuse of discretion (Salazar v. Dawson, 1992).

Most public school boards are responsible for providing safe and wide-ranging transportation plans for the majority of their students. For example, Ohio law requires school boards to provide transportation for students in kindergarten through eighth grade who live more than 2 miles from school. To this end, Ohio law provides clear evidence that a significant number of students, such as those who attend secondary school, are not required to be transported to and from school. While most boards do provide transportation for students K-12, they are not required to do so for all students. For example, an appellate court in Ohio held that a school board could eliminate high school busing due to financial constraints (Russell v. Gallia County Local School District, 1992).

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