A recent webinar explored how transportation can support attendance, enrollment and equity while districts contend with driver shortages, rising costs and growing specialized transportation needs.
For Angelo Grau, transportation supervisor at Mesquite Independent School District in Texas, the student transportation challenge has changed quickly. Paying drivers more has not solved the school bus driver shortage. Meanwhile, special education and McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act transportation needs continue to grow.
“No more than 10 years ago, we were paying drivers about $14 an hour in the area. Now that’s increased almost double to close to $30 an hour in some districts in the area,” Grau said during a Thursday webinar sponsored by transportation network company HopSkipDrive.
Mesquite ISD operates about 220 vehicles and transports roughly 100 students receiving McKinney-Vento service across the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Grau said declining student enrollment has not necessarily translated into less transportation demand because the district has experienced increases in special education and McKinney-Vento students, who often require lower-capacity vehicles, monitors or longer trips.
“It’s not just drivers, [but] monitors as well,” he said of the staffing challenge.
Matching the Vehicle to the Student
Grau said districts need flexibility rather than expecting the yellow school bus to efficiently handle every trip.
He shared an example of a parent that falls under the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, who was concerned about a student riding a Type A yellow bus because of the negative stigma. Cost, fuel economy, comfort and available staff can also influence the best transportation mode for a particular trip, he added.
“These students are customers, and should be treated as such,” Grau noted.
Mesquite ISD utilizes alternative transportation through HopSkipDrive when its own resources cannot efficiently cover a trip, Grau said. He added that approach saves money and can free district buses and staff for routes where they make more operational sense.
When evaluating a trip, he said the district first considers whether it can serve the student without straining existing resources, then looks at budget, opportunities to combine trips and available transportation options.
“We have to take a look at the dynamic of everything that goes on,” Grau said.
The district is also developing employees along a pipeline from monitors to non-CDL drivers and eventually CDL school bus drivers. Grau said employees who demonstrate a commitment to students as monitors can often carry that mindset into the driver’s seat.
Student Transportation Connects to Attendance and Enrollment
Adam Gleicher, director of marketing at HopSkipDrive, said transportation needs a larger role in districtwide planning. The company’s 2026 State of School Transportation Report found 68 percent of parents said transportation factored into their school choice, while over half said a transportation problem caused their child to miss at least one day of school in the past year.
“You can’t show up at school without a way to get there,” Gleicher said.
Yet the report found transportation does not always participate in discussions about the issues it affects. Only 32 percent of districts said transportation is always included in chronic absenteeism discussions, and 27 percent said the same for enrollment and school choice.
“The ones that bring it into those conversations are treating it as what it actually is — a crucial strategic asset for districts and a central part of every student’s educational journey,” Gleicher said.
His recommendation was straightforward: “Match the ride to the need.”
Data Can Help Districts Spend Smarter
Dustin Kress, general manager of RouteWise AI and former chief of staff for operations at Denver Public Schools, focused on understanding the true cost of transportation before districts make cuts.
The report found that 54 percent of districts had been asked to reduce transportation spending during the past two years. But 61 percent said they did not know their annual transportation cost per rider, while 64 percent did not know whether their district had conducted a total cost-of-ownership analysis for vans and other non-bus vehicles.
“If you don’t know your cost per rider and you don’t know your relative costs of operating vehicles in your fleet, you can’t optimally identify where the real savings are,” Kress said.
RouteWise AI data also showed the uneven resources required for specialized transportation. Across sample districts, special education and McKinney-Vento students represented about 5 percent of routed students but used 44 percent of route resources.
“When you work that math out on a per-pupil basis, districts are investing 15 [times more] per person more for SPED or McKinney-Vento students,” Kress explained.
Kress said technology can help transportation teams model options before leaders make decisions about bell times, school closures, specialized program placement or budget reductions.
“It’s often a challenge to get this data for district leadership because kind of evaluating a new scenario will often mean fully rerouting to that scenario, which involves a lot of manual work,” he explained.
The presenters ultimately advocated a multimodal strategy that keeps the school bus at the center of student transportation while using smaller vehicles and transportation service providers like HopSkipDrive where they better match student needs. For Grau, the takeaway came back to a practical reality: Transportation departments can no longer assume one vehicle type, staffing model or solution will cover every student.
Watch the webinar on demand.
Written with the assistance of AI and a live session transcript.
The post Texas District Uses Multimodal Transportation to Stretch Limited Resources appeared first on School Transportation News.
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Gladys De Lucio is the Director of Transportation for East Aurora School District 131, one of Illinois’ largest Spanish-speaking districts. With 21 years of experience in school transportation, she oversees daily operations with a strong focus on safety, bus stop planning, and community engagement. De Lucio leads both traditional bus services and alternative transportation programs, working closely with bilingual dispatch teams to support non-English-speaking families. Her deep commitment to equitable access ensures that every student has reliable transit to and from school. She holds a degree from Robert Morris University–Illinois.
Leon Fornelli, MBA, is the Area General Manager of Alternative Transportation at First Alt®, where he leads inclusive student transportation programs across nine states. A seasoned leader in education logistics, Fornelli develops and scales operations from the ground up, always with safety, equity, and innovation in mind. He’s deeply committed to increasing access, amplifying parent and community engagement, and building systems that meet diverse student needs, including non-traditional routes and support. Fornelli also champions technology integration and workforce development in transportation services.