New data reveals a connection most districts aren’t tracking — and a strategic lever most aren’t using.
Declining enrollment has moved to the top of the list of concerns district leaders are managing. In RAND’s spring 2026 American School District Panel survey, 36% of district leaders ranked it among their top three challenges, up from 25% last year.
Some of this is due to demographics. Birthrates have been falling since the 2008 recession. The number of U.S. high school graduates peaked in 2025, and a decline researchers are calling the “enrollment cliff” has begun. But demographics aren’t the whole story.
Expanding school choice programs are giving families more alternatives, which means school districts are competing harder for students. In the RAND survey mentioned above, data shows that about 40% of districts are considering marketing campaigns to attract families, one-third are considering expanding pre-K offerings, and a similar share are weighing new extracurricular offerings.
Each of these strategies makes sense on its own, but when thinking about ways to boost school enrollment, none of them address this critical question: Do families have a reliable way to get their children there?
New data from our 2026 State of School Transportation Report suggests that transportation should play a critical part in enrollment strategy. According to the report, which surveyed parents of K–12 students and district administrators nationwide, 68% of parents say transportation availability was a factor in choosing their child’s current school — and 49% say it was a major factor.
That data is a strong signal that districts shouldn’t ignore.
Transportation Access Impacts School Choice Decisions
Nearly a quarter of U.S. parents actively searched for a different school for their child in the past year, according to the National School Choice Awareness Foundation’s January 2026 survey of nearly 4,000 parents. When that survey asked what stops families from following through once they start looking, transportation challenges ranked among the top four barriers, cited by 25% of respondents — right alongside concerns about disruption and uncertainty about making the wrong choice.
Families aren’t only weighing whether a different school is better academically. They’re weighing whether or not they have access to safe, dependable transport options. When the answer is no, that barrier alone can stop them from enrolling their children.
In school choice contexts, school transportation availability and eligibility are strongly associated with enrollment. That is a key finding from recent research about school choice and transportation published by the Association for Education Finance and Policy. Another recent study on school choice and transportation in Detroit indicates that families of kindergartners were four to five percentage points more likely to enroll them in a given school if that school offered busing.
Taken together, this data points to a simple reality: For a growing share of families, the decision of where to enroll a child isn’t just about the school itself — it’s also about whether or not the school is offering transportation service parents can rely on.
Charter and Private School Parents Are Likely to Switch Schools for Transportation
Some of the clearest evidence from our 2026 State of School Transportation Report of the impact transportation has on enrollment decisions comes from families whose children attend charter and private schools. Among parents of charter school students we surveyed, 79% say they would consider enrolling their child in a different school with better transportation — even without any academic improvement. Among private school parents, that figure climbs to 82%.
These are families who have already made a deliberate, values-driven choice about their child’s education. They are not indifferent to school quality, but more than three-quarters of them say they’d consider walking away from their current school for no reason other than better transportation.
Where Attendance Comes In
Beyond enrollment, transportation access plays a direct role in student attendance. While many school districts acknowledge the link between transportation barriers and chronic absenteeism, very few are actively measuring or analyzing it.
Three-quarters (75%) of district respondents to this year’s State of School Transportation survey say they believe transportation access affects attendance, yet only 25% say they actually track and report on that relationship. More than a quarter (28%) indicate they collect both attendance and transportation data but have never formally analyzed whether one drives the other.
What this means is that school transportation challenges are directly impacting whether students make it to the classroom, but few school districts seem to have the reporting in place to enable them to utilize transportation as a strategic solution.
According to our survey findings, 52% of parents report that a transportation obstacle caused their child to miss an entire day of school at least once in the past year. Furthermore, 63% report that transportation issues caused their child to arrive late. Far from being rare occurrences, these disruptions are affecting the majority of district families.
The transportation-attendance connection isn’t really hard to understand: A canceled route, a missed pickup, or a family with no backup option turns into a missed day of school — and missed days accumulate into chronic absenteeism.
Districts that start tracking this connection, and then build flexible capacity with a supplemental transportation partner like HopSkipDrive to fill in gaps when needed will be in a much stronger position to intervene so an occasional missed school day does not become a chronic one.
Let's hear from Mark Hill, Director of Transportation at Midland Independent School District in Texas, about how he used HopSkipDrive to get a student experiencing homelessness back in the classroom:
In Some States, Attendance Impacts Budget
For districts in states that fund schools based on average daily attendance rather than enrollment alone — California, Idaho, Kentucky, Missouri, and Texas among them — a student who doesn’t show up because a ride fell through affects more than that day’s instruction. It also affects district revenue.
California’s Local Control Funding Formula ties the bulk of state aid to average daily attendance, and the state’s Legislative Analyst’s Office reported in 2026 that actual attendance is tracking below the assumptions built into the state budget. That’s an indication that real revenue is already slipping away for school districts in California — the state with the largest K–12 system in the country — because of student absences. Every student who doesn’t show up because of a transportation issue contributes to this gap. Because California recalculates funding based on actual attendance throughout the school year, the financial implications show up well before a district reaches its next budget cycle.
Missouri is in the middle of shifting its funding formula to weigh both attendance and enrollment, rather than attendance alone. For the current fiscal year, attendance still makes up 80% of the formula, with enrollment factored in for the remaining 20% — and that split will keep shifting until the two are weighted equally by 2030. As enrollment carries more weight in how Missouri calculates funding, a district’s revenue will become tied not just to whether students show up, but also to whether they enroll in the first place. Far from fading as the formula changes, transportation’s link to a district’s bottom line in Missouri will only get stronger.
Whether a state ties funding to attendance, enrollment, or a blend of both, the underlying math doesn’t change: A district’s revenue depends on getting kids to school and keeping them enrolled — and transportation is a factor districts can act on that touches both sides of that equation.
Transportation as a Strategic Opportunity
The responsibility districts have to make sure every student has a safe, reliable way to get to school isn’t just about avoiding risk. It’s a chance to move both enrollment and attendance numbers in the right direction. Districts that treat transportation as a relevant, strategic variable, rather than a routine cost or function to manage, can make progress on both of these issues at the same time.
Almost half (44%) of parents surveyed say they have seriously considered switching their child's school because of a transportation problem, which shows how much weight families place on districts getting transportation right.
Yet there is real opportunity here. When a district invests in flexible, alternative transportation to make sure all students can get to school regardless of their individual needs, it isn’t only taking action to support enrollment; it’s also creating the daily consistency students need to actually show up and stay engaged.
Where HopSkipDrive Comes In
When a district can’t consistently get a student in foster care to their school of origin, across town to a Career and Technical Education (CTE) program, to a sports game or other off-campus extracurricular activity, or to school on a day when there aren’t enough drivers and a bus route falls through, it’s not just a minor transportation hiccup. It creates a real risk for both enrollment and attendance — one that can carry direct financial consequences for the district.
These are the gaps HopSkipDrive was built to close. We work with districts to facilitate reliable transportation with just six hours’ notice for any student who can’t be served by a traditional bus route, whether they need a ride for a day, a month, or an entire school year.
We know the daily challenge for districts and transportation teams isn’t the students who can ride successfully on the yellow bus. It’s the exceptions, like:
Same-day and next-day McKinney-Vento rides for students experiencing homelessness
School-of-origin transportation for students living in foster care
Compliant rides for students with disabilities and Individualized Education Programs
Off-campus transportation for CTE programs, internships, or extracurricular activities
We coordinate rides directly with HopSkipDrive CareDrivers rather than through layers of subcontractors, so districts get the speed and visibility they need to intervene before a transportation issue turns into an absence — and an absence turns into a family reconsidering whether or not to stay enrolled.
Transportation was never meant to be a background function in a district’s educational operations. The data from our recent report suggests it’s shaping which schools families choose and whether their kids show up consistently once enrolled — two outcomes every district leader is accountable for.