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On her first day of third grade Monday, Aravis Flora waited for her yellow Indianapolis Public Schools bus sporting a scrunchie decorated with school buses and stop signs.
Her mother, Vanessa Flora, had glanced at her phone minutes earlier to check when a different IPS bus would arrive in their Fletcher Place neighborhood to pick up her middle child Emmett, who was starting seventh grade. She gave him an update on its estimated arrival time as he ate breakfast.
But it was Elias, her oldest child who was starting junior year at Shortridge High School, who got out the door first. He took the city’s public transportation system. He walked about five minutes to the nearest IndyGo bus stop on the Red Line.
His classmate Darrick Colon gets off at the same Red Line stop by Shortridge, but his path to get there is different. As he rides the IndyGo 8 bus across the White River to get to the Red Line, he sees downtown businesses and the Indianapolis Zoo waking up. Despite a brief delay, he got to school before the 9 a.m. bell.
One mile up the road from Shortridge, some students arriving at Believe Circle City High School this week have the option of using the charter school’s bus service.
Thousands of Indianapolis students are returning to school this week, but how they get there can vary greatly. That’s one outcome of the evolving education environment in Indianapolis. On the one hand, there’s the traditional IPS district. On the other are nearly 60 charter schools spread out within or near the district borders.
A new state-mandated group, the Indianapolis Local Education Alliance, is tasked with addressing an unequal environment in which IPS schools offer transportation, but not all charter schools can afford to do so. As the group ponders solutions, current partnerships could offer some ideas for the group to scale up.
On his commute, Elias reflected on the prospects of junior year — the hardest year, he admitted.
“I should be able to work through everything,” he said. “All I need to worry about is keeping up with the work load.”
Existing transportation partnerships could inform ILEA’s proposals
This year, more than 1,400 IPS high school students will ride IndyGo through a partnership that began with a pilot program in 2018. Over 19,000 students will ride the yellow school bus service that the district pays First Student for.
IPS estimates spending roughly $2,300 per student for transportation annually.
In the charter sector, the transportation picture is less straightforward. Some charters in the district’s Innovation Network receive transportation from the district at no charge. Other independent charter schools contract for their own yellow bus service — but at prices that can be steep for a smaller school entity. And some even run their own passenger van bus service and hire drivers.
But this year, the Rooted School and IPS have teamed up to give kids a way to and from school.
The independent charter school on the eastside that starts classes on Wednesday will partner with IPS this year to bring First Student transportation to 200 students at a lower cost than what it would pay for under its own contract with the company. It’s the charter’s latest attempt to solve the challenge. Previously, it operated its own 14-passenger van and contracted through a different company.
To school founder Ma’at Lands, the partnership is a perfect example of picking collaboration over competition.
Some of the school’s students have siblings who attend Sankofa School of Success at Arlington Woods 99, an IPS Innovation Network school that is just across the street. The new arrangement will remove a barrier for families with students attending multiple schools in the neighborhood, Lands said.
But making the partnership work also means adopting flexible schedules. Rooted School is moving its start time an hour earlier this year to 7:30 a.m. so that the buses can shift to serving IPS students afterward, Lands said.
“Now, being up under IPS ... we have this cost savings,” Lands said. “They just have a robust transportation department that really is just not a heavy lift on our school.”
Other charter school leaders are trying to collaborate with each other.
The recent merger of Ace Preparatory Academy with Circle City Prep allows the schools to provide transportation to older siblings who have been dropped off by families at Ace Prep, a K-6 school, and are continuing their education at Circle City, a K-8 school.
The solution helps Ace Prep become an option for families with multiple students looking for a more streamlined K-8 experience.
When IPS broke up its K-8 schools last year, Circle City Prep received a lot of families who still wanted to have their elementary and middle school child at the same school, Circle City Prep founder Megan Murphy told Chalkbeat in May after her school merged with Ace Prep.
“Now at Ace Prep, yes they won’t have the eighth grade there, but you can have one site in which your kids are going to second grade and eighth grade, and we provide that transportation to the eighth grader,” Murphy said. “I think it helps a little bit to make a one-stop shop for families.”
Amelia Pak-Harvey covers Indianapolis and Lawrence Township schools for Chalkbeat Indiana. Contact Amelia at apak-harvey@chalkbeat.org.