7 Key Takeaways from HopSkipDrive’s 2025 Safety Report

At HopSkipDrive, we believe trust is earned through transparency. Each year, we publish a Safety Report giving schools, families, and community partners a detailed look at our safety data and ongoing investments in safe student transportation. Our seventh annual report covers 2025, a year in which we grew into new states, crossed a major milestone in safe miles driven, and rolled out lots of new safety features and initiatives. 

Here’s a snapshot of our 2025 Safety Report and the latest platform updates we launched last year.

#1: 99.70% Incident-Free Performance Through Full-Journey Oversight

In 2025, HopSkipDrive served more than 2,000 school districts, private and charter schools, government agencies, and nonprofits across 20 states — and 99.70% of rides ended without a safety incident of any kind. While others in school transportation may report only on collision data, our safety metrics cover road safety events as well as Community Guidelines or Zero Tolerance Policy violations, vehicle condition issues, and more. Our safety data also starts the moment a CareDriver is on the way to a pickup rather than just when a rider is in the vehicle — giving us a more comprehensive safety dataset than the industry standard.

There were zero critical safety incidents in 2025, including no fatalities, physical assaults, or incidents of sexual misconduct. Our collision rate remained exceptionally low at just 0.015% of all rides, with only a tiny fraction (0.002%) classified as major. This means that 99.99% of rides were completed without a collision. That rate has held steady as our volume has grown, a direct result of the rigorous standards and proactive systems we invest in year over year.

#2: We Strengthened Our CareDriver Certification Process

CareDrivers already average 10 years of caregiving experience and come from backgrounds like nursing, teaching, and childcare. Before gaining access to the HopSkipDrive platform, every CareDriver must complete our 15-point certification process. This in-depth process includes FBI fingerprint-based background checks; criminal history searches across county, state, and national databases; sex offender registry and Child Abuse and Neglect screenings; motor vehicle records reviews; continuous criminal monitoring; and a 19-point annual vehicle inspection.

Unlike transportation brokers that hand off responsibility to layers of subcontractors, HopSkipDrive maintains a direct relationship with every CareDriver on the platform, which means these standards aren’t aspirational. They’re verified and enforced.

In 2025, we added a qualitative video screening to the CareDriver vetting process. Standard background checks confirm history but don’t reveal how someone responds when a child is distressed or whether they approach the work with genuine empathy. The video screening does. Candidates record responses to scenario-based questions, and dedicated specialists evaluate each submission against specific safety and caregiving criteria before any CareDriver candidate advances.

Participation in the Industry Sharing Safety Program adds another layer of protection, letting us review performance across other Transportation Network Company (TNC) platforms, enabling us to act quickly if a driver has been deactivated elsewhere for serious misconduct.

#3: High-Needs Rides Get the Same Safety Standards as Every Other Ride

Our specialty transportation offerings went nationwide in 2025, extending the same standard of care to students with the most complex transportation needs. Wheelchair-Accessible Vehicle rides are fulfilled by CarePartner™ drivers who go through the same rigorous certification process as CareDrivers. Rider Assistants are available for students with Individualized Education Programs (IEPs) or those who do better with extra support during transit.

To date, HopSkipDrive has facilitated more than 1.7 million IEP rides and 2.9 million foster and McKinney-Vento rides. For districts, these are often the rides that create the most operational strain; they are the ones that are hardest to staff, hardest to schedule, and that carry the highest compliance burden. HopSkipDrive takes on that logistics load directly, without subcontracting it out to a third party that a district has no visibility into. 

In 2025, we partnered with Rooted in Play, a child development and behavioral health organization, to launch new, expert-developed CareDriver curriculum. This training focuses on neurodiversity, sensory processing, de-escalation, and trauma-informed care. The impact has been significant: 94% of CareDrivers surveyed feel confident supporting neurodivergent riders, and 85% found the new training essential for those rides. This expertise allows drivers to recognize that student behavior is often a form of communication, enabling them to de-escalate situations and ensure a smoother ride.

Enhanced “Must Be Met” protocols were also launched last year, requiring verified confirmation that vulnerable students are handed off to an authorized adult at drop-off, ensuring their safety and well-being.

#4: We Get Ahead of Problems — We Don’t Just Respond to Them

Proactivity has been central to how HopSkipDrive approaches safety since the very beginning. Our Safe Ride Support^® team monitors every trip in real time to detect potential safety issues, allow for quick intervention, and provide school districts with greater control and oversight — freeing up their time to focus on the effective management of the rest of their transportation fleet.

Taking things one step further, Proactive Ride Intervention is a new HopSkipDrive-exclusive feature released in 2025 that enables us to detect risky driving behavior from the moment a CareDriver is en route to pickup, before a rider ever gets in the vehicle. When a potential safety issue is flagged, our team can reach out immediately to cancel the ride and assign a new CareDriver, pre-emptively stopping incidents before they happen. 

In 2025, we also built on our safety foundation with CareDriver Trends, a new feature that gives CareDrivers visibility into their own safety and operational data. By consolidating telematics scores, on-time arrivals, and ride check-ins into an accessible trends rating, this feature enables CareDrivers to identify and correct patterns in their own driving behavior to continually improve performance.

#5: New Features in 2025 Give Riders, Families, and Schools More Ways to Stay Informed

Last year also brought several new tools focused on keeping riders, families, and school staff better informed throughout the ride experience: 

• Ride Recording launched in 2025, capturing encrypted video and audio during every trip. Footage goes to secure, SOC 2-compliant servers — SOC 2 being an independent security standard verified by third-party auditors — and CareDrivers never have access to it. Footage is wiped from their device as soon as the ride ends. When accounts of an incident don’t line up, there’s a record to go back to, and that accountability protects CareDrivers as much as it protects riders.

• A Rider Support Line also launched in select markets so students can reach our Safe Ride Support® team directly by text or call during a ride. 

• The Caregiver Great Start Program brings one-on-one outreach to every eligible family before their first ride, making sure tracking features are set up and that families understand the platform before day one. Partners have seen a noticeable drop in first-week support requests as a result. 

#6: We Brought in Outside Experts to Guide Our Safety Innovations

In 2025, HopSkipDrive formalized its Safety Advisory Council, a group of national experts in road safety, interpersonal safety, child development, and behavioral health from organizations including the Governors Highway Safety Association, Safe Kids Worldwide, Truckers Against Trafficking, and Rooted in Play. The Council plays a vital role in shaping our product strategy, ensuring that new services and features are developed and scaled to precisely meet the unique transportation requirements of students with specialized needs.

Our Trust & Safety and Safe Ride Support teams also completed trauma-informed care training in 2025 through a partnership with the National Organization for Victim Assistance (NOVA). This training is specifically designed to help HopSkipDrive team members recognize and respond appropriately to signs of trauma, creating a supportive environment for those in need of support. 

#7: Our Student Data Security Is Independently Verified

In April 2025, HopSkipDrive achieved SOC 2 Type II compliance, making us the first alternative student transportation company to do so. For districts evaluating vendors, that distinction matters: SOC 2 Type II means our data protection practices have been tested and validated by independent auditors over a sustained period. A transportation vendor without this verification is asking districts to take data security on faith. We maintain more than 60 data and privacy controls, audited daily and verified annually by an accredited firm.

Beyond the certification, specific features are built into the platform to ensure data is only accessible when a ride requires it. Ride Organizers receive a CareDriver’s name, photo, and vehicle information only after a ride is claimed, and CareDrivers only receive specific rider details upon pickup. Once a ride is completed, sensitive information is immediately hidden from the CareDriver’s view. All in-app communication runs through masked phone numbers, and copy-pasting of sensitive data fields is disabled within the app.

Looking Ahead: Our Ongoing Commitment to Safety

With seven annual Safety Reports now behind us, the data keeps pointing in the same direction. HopSkipDrive is committed to being a leading student transportation partner that backs up its claims with data. We’ll keep working to raise the bar for safe school transportation in 2026.