She still travels home on the bus every day, first meeting her sister, taking her home and then some days getting back on the bus to get to work serving dinner at a Roland Park retirement community by 4:30 p.m. On one December afternoon, two buses failed to stop for her and a group of students waiting across from Western. Those delays meant Brooke’s 5.5-mile ride home took 90 minutes.
Bus drivers’ failure to pick up students — sometimes because they’re already full, other times without a clear reason — is a recurring complaint at schools across the city. Arnold said the MTA takes the issue seriously and will discipline drivers who pass students at stops without cause.
Over time, Brooke has let go of her frustrations with transit and accepted she has no control over her schedule. “I can’t even be irritated about it because the bus driver doesn’t care about me,” she said. “I’m just a student at this point. All I can do is show up.”
Sometimes, though, she feels people don’t understand her struggles. Like many city school students, Brooke’s high school years were filled with personal challenges — a sports injury, deaths of loved ones and issues at home. The failure of transit became yet another barrier to performing well in school.
“Stuff keeps happening and happening and happening, but all I can do is just push through it,” she said. “No one cares about the perseverance I have.”
Now in her senior year, her goal of attending one of the nation’s most prestigious universities is replaced by the reality of her grades and attendance issues.
She’s still working hard, she said, and hoping the University of Maryland, College Park, or Howard, Morgan State or Stevenson universities will accept her.
Bad grades, worse attendance
Nowhere is the harm of a disjointed transportation system felt more than in first period, where citywide failure rates for high school classes are 6.6 percentage points higher than the average for the rest of the school day, according to data obtained from Baltimore City Public Schools through a public records request.
Paul Laurence Dunbar High School teacher Tim Faass struggled one year to teach an Advanced Placement Environmental Science class in first period. On many days, he said, he started with just three students in the room, so he’d wait 30 minutes, halfway through the class, for the rest to arrive before he covered the most critical material.
The lack of reliable transit, Faass said, was “the largest issue facing our class every day.”
City school attendance has been lower than the state average for years, and 49% of the system’s students are chronically absent — missing more than 10% of school days a year — the highest in the state. Santelises said recently that improving Baltimore’s transit would help.
In dozens of interviews, students told The Banner that unreliable transit and bad weather discourage them from attending school. Students said that if their bus is 30 or 40 minutes late, they sometimes give up and skip school that day.
Digital Harbor High School Principal Mavis Jackson meticulously tracks attendance. She doesn’t schedule science, foreign language or Advanced Placement classes for first period because they are more demanding and harder to catch up in. She pays her staff extra to open the South Baltimore building 45 minutes early to encourage students to take an earlier bus by offering a warm, dry place to wait. On rainy days, average attendance at her school drops from about 92% to as low as 77%.
Beyond the logistical nightmare, many students say the ride to school feels unsafe and starts too early, leaving them exhausted.
To be in their seats by a 7:30 a.m. bell, the average city student who relies on mass transit must leave their house by 6:30 a.m, a Banner analysis found. The earliest trips, beginning at the far edges of the city, start as early as 5:40 a.m.
Once on the buses, students describe being surrounded by marijuana smoke, sexually harassed and confronted by bizarre and frightening behaviors. One Bard High School Early College graduate, Troy Stull, described a man who sat down next to him and kept edging closer, dressed only in a T-shirt and a towel around his waist. Another day he saw a man waving a Styrofoam mannequin head on a stick. The man was singing to the head, which he had draped with a wig, and rubbing the stick over his genitals.
Those incidents, some education advocates believe, have academic consequences.
Students are experiencing “a ton of frustration and unreliability from the systems that are supposed to support them,” said Schulman, of the Fund for Educational Excellence. “We cannot be surprised that when they get to school they’re not quite ready to engage.”
The perfect storm
Generations of city public school students rode transit with relative ease from the 1920s to the 1960s, when Baltimore’s dense population swelled. Students hopped on streetcars that ran every two or three minutes and were never more than a few minutes’ walk away. Buses replaced streetcars in the 1960s and over the decades, the number of bus lines decreased as people migrated to the suburbs.
Things changed dramatically starting in 2005, when the district moved away from a system in which students attended high schools close to their homes and instead offered them the ability to apply to any school in the city. Middle school choice followed in 2010.
Suddenly, students were traveling to schools across the city, but city leaders gave little consideration to changing the transportation system.
Just as students began relying more on the MTA, the service began declining. The number of miles that Baltimore’s transit covered each year dropped from 2016 to 2023, according to the Central Maryland Transportation Alliance. Baltimore now has the second-longest transit commute time of any similarly sized city in the country, a study it commissioned showed. The Transportation Alliance gave the MTA a D-plus grade for reliability because it ranks in the bottom third of its peer cities nationally.
Arnold, the MTA administrator, acknowledges that the agency’s performance is not optimal because of longtime disinvestment in public transit, but she said she is trying to make improvements.
Meanwhile, since 2010 families have been migrating away from the city’s core neighborhoods with the greatest concentration of transit and toward the edges, according to an analysis of U.S. Census data by The Banner.
As families were moving, the school system was making other major changes. City school leaders broke up many large comprehensive high schools and allowed dozens of charter schools to open. Schools aren’t dispersed evenly around the city, and many aren’t where students now live.
Today, their routes to school are longer and more complicated. Fifty-eight percent of trips to school involve transferring from one line to another. That means one late bus can prevent a student from catching a connecting bus.
MTA buses come on average every 20 minutes, and it is not unusual for them to arrive every 35 minutes, The Banner’s analysis found. Ideally, that time would be closer to 10 minutes, said Candace Brakewood, an associate professor and transit researcher at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
To make matters worse, sometimes buses get delayed in traffic and two come at the same time. Then students may wait twice as long for the next bus.
Students complain that they can’t trust transit apps, which often tell them a bus is minutes away when it’s not. That’s in part because about 1 in 10 scheduled buses do not share a live location, The Banner’s analysis found.
That analysis also showed 1 out of every 4 morning buses don’t arrive on time by MTA’s standard. The agency considers its buses on time if they stop within a nine-minute window of their scheduled time — two minutes early to seven minutes late.
While there’s no national standard, it’s more common for large urban transit agencies — like the New York City transit system, for example — to define “on time” as up to one minute early and five minutes late. By that measure, only 62% of Baltimore buses are on time during students’ morning commutes; it’s 52% in the afternoon.
Certain bus lines are more problematic than others. On the No. 22 line, for example, only 56% of morning buses arrive between 1 minute early and 5 minutes late, The Banner’s analysis found. As many as 3,300 students who attend 33 different schools may ride that line for at least part of their journey.
And students at certain schools are more likely to face tough commutes. At least four of the city’s largest high schools don’t have enough buses that stop nearby to get all their transit-eligible kids there in the 30 minutes before the first bell.
Digital Harbor, for instance, enrolls more than 1,500 kids who don’t live close enough to walk. The 20 buses, on average, that stop within half a mile of the school each morning can only fit 1,200 kids — and that’s if no one but students ride them.
MTA officials said some of The Banner’s estimates don’t reflect how many people are actually riding their buses. The agency uses bus sensors and cellphone data to count passengers, who number hundreds lower on some lines.
The Banner’s analysis, however, uses the same logic as county school systems when they map out their yellow bus routes: There should be room for every student who doesn’t live within walking distance, even if they end up finding another way to school.
A national outlier
Few U.S. cities suffer the dual problems Baltimore students face: a poorly functioning transit system and no dedicated school buses past elementary school.
In Chicago, Washington, D.C., and New York City, students ride mass transit to the school of their choosing, but those systems are far more extensive and considered more reliable than Baltimore’s.
In some big cities, like Chicago, some middle schoolers are given rides on yellow buses.
And in places without reliable public transportation, school officials have sometimes supplemented the mass transit system. In Denver, yellow buses loop through areas where transit is scarce. In New Orleans, where there is school choice and limited public transit, schools are required to provide transportation.
Detroit — which has school choice and unreliable transit, as well as high populations of Black students and economically disadvantaged students — may offer the closest comparison to Baltimore, said Sarah Lenhoff, a transit researcher and associate professor at Wayne State University.
“Students are offered this option of riding public transit, but yet that system is not set up to serve them,” she said.
Her study in Detroit showed that three-quarters of families had given up on transit and were driving their children to school, some in borrowed cars. More students were getting to school on ride-hailing services than on public transit.
“If you have a school system that is asking parents to do the work to find the good school for a child,” she said, “then we have to provide transportation for them to get there.”
Sam Speroni, a transit researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that Maryland was the only one of 10 states he studied that allowed local school districts to decide whether to provide transportation.
Baltimore stands alone in its choice. The district transports its elementary schoolers, along with special education and homeless students as required by federal law.
Baltimore County’s school system operates a fleet of about 1,000 yellow buses — larger than MTA’s 800-bus fleet — that deliver 80,000 students every day. Anne Arundel County, with a school enrollment close in size to the city’s, spends about $48 million of its $1.5 billion budget to transport its general education students on yellow buses.
Anne Arundel also provides yellow buses for students to attend magnet schools, no matter where they live.
A two-tiered system
Every day a van of 20 students leaves Federal Hill, one of the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods, headed to Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, a premier high school a 23-minute drive away. Their families pay $350 a month to avoid an unpredictable 45-minute trek on the MTA.
“We knew that this was way cheaper than private school, and we love Poly,” said parent Wendy Muher. “I am aware that not everyone can do this.”
Across the city, parents and students have resorted to a variety of alternatives to public transit. Students arrive by scooter, bike, Uber and private cars.
Some years ago, the principal of Green Street Academy bought an old, faded minivan and drove around to several MTA bus stops every morning picking up her students. “Not only did you see a change in grades, but a change in their emotional well-being,” said Crystal Harden-Lindsey, who led the school before she left in 2022.
Some parents said they moved out of the city or wanted to, unwilling to subject their children to the commutes.
Kristen Lewis used to pay $150 a week for her son’s charter school van to pick him up. She has never been able to drive him to school because she has to leave early for her health care job in Annapolis.
This year, they picked Coppin Academy High School, a small school on the other side of the city, where if he kept his grades up he could earn an associate’s degree by the time he gets his diploma, saving the family two years of college tuition.
But just a few months into his freshman year, he was late to school about half the time and his grades were suffering, worrying his mother. Kaleb adjusted his schedule and is now taking a 6:30 a.m. bus so he can make it to his 8:20 a.m. first period. He waits outside in the cold sometimes as long as 30 minutes before the school doors open.
Baltimore is the only place in Maryland where a parent with a car and a flexible work schedule — or the income to pay for a private driver — are necessary in order to get to school on time consistently.
Santelises acknowledged the inequity in the system. “Choice disproportionately impacts those with the least resources,” she said.
A quarter of Baltimore residents don’t own cars, according to the Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance. In areas like Southwest Baltimore and Cherry Hill, it’s closer to half.
The trip to school on public transit is on average four times longer than the same trip in a car, The Banner analysis found. The result is a two-tiered system that leaves those with the least resources with the longest commutes and, ultimately, the biggest barriers to academic success.
Jayzanay “Jazzy” Blessett had the brains and the grades to get into Baltimore City College, a selective public high school northeast of the city center. The school offered a debate team and the Advanced Placement classes she needed to improve her chances of getting into the Johns Hopkins University, where she’d always dreamed of attending. Tuition, room and board there is free for any city public school student whose family makes less than $80,000 a year.
She lived in far-east Baltimore near the Bayview Medical Center, however. A ride to City would take an hour one way on transit, a psychological hurdle for a teen who took buses to middle school and once witnessed a stabbing. “The fights and the violence and just the mean people … too much,” she said.
So Jazzy chose Patterson High School, just a 10-minute walk away but with fewer opportunities to take AP classes. Many were scheduled at the same time, so she convinced administrators to let her take AP English online, earning an A in the class. She will graduate with a 4.0 GPA, and has scored a 3 and a 4 on two AP exams — better than two-thirds of her peers locally and nationally. But, she’s only taken four AP classes, far fewer than other applicants to top-tier colleges.
In mid-December, Johns Hopkins rejected Jazzy’s application.
She has other options — she has been accepted to nine other less prestigious colleges, though none offer the kind of financial aid Hopkins would have.
Jazzy loves Patterson’s diverse immigrant community and its accepting culture, but she still questions the choice she made in eighth grade. “Sometimes I don’t feel like I made the right decision. It will always be like a constant conflict.”
Who’s to blame?
No agency claims full responsibility for getting Baltimore kids to school, and little effort has been made to understand the extent of the problem, leaving no one fully accountable.
No one knows how many of the roughly 25,000 students who are given free bus passes, called OneCards, are riding MTA. The bus drivers don’t require students to swipe their cards when they get on the bus, MTA officials said, because it would slow down boarding.
When asked who is ultimately responsible for getting students to school, Arnold, MTA’s top administrator, said, “I am not sure I am the right person to answer that question. We’re a public transit agency. We’re really focused on ensuring that all of our riders can get where they need to go safely, efficiently and reliably.”
Still, the MTA does reroute 185 buses to stop in front of schools when school is in session and has a full-time employee who coordinates with the school system to improve service for students. But the MTA can’t always accommodate last-minute changes to school start times or enrollment, the agency said in a statement.
Until 2019, city schools paid MTA for students’ free transit passes. The state has taken over that $5.6 million cost, but the school system hasn’t used that savings to help students get to school.
Transit experts say that yellow buses could supplement the MTA’s busiest lines, through neighborhoods where transit is scarce, or where wait times between buses are particularly long.
Santelises, the city schools CEO, said in an interview that she would be open to considering that option but that a full transition to school buses isn’t feasible.
“With the level of choice we have, the cost of yellow buses would blow up the budget,” she said.
She is trying to mitigate the problem by adding popular classes and programs to schools around the city, so that students don’t have to travel so far.
She hopes that someday parents will believe they have “a quality school option in every ZIP code.” That, she said, is fully the school system’s responsibility.
But those changes will take years.
In the meantime, no coalition of parents, students, legislators and school administrators has emerged to advocate for change. The Maryland State Department of Education hasn’t taken action, either. In a statement, the department suggested that students pick high schools closer to home and the city start school later.
Santelises said Baltimore’s situation would be viewed by the public as a “travesty“ in other cities where residents have higher expectations of their transit system.
“It would just be embarrassing,” she said. “It’s not embarrassing to anybody here.”
Just last school year, a Howard County school bus operator drew widespread outrage when it failed to pick up thousands of students. The superintendent apologized, elected officials got involved and staff worked furiously to solve the problem in a few weeks.
In Baltimore, there’s little outcry over the inequity baked into the system and no urgency to fix it.
That sends a message to students, one they internalize, said Bard High School English teacher Madeleine Monson-Rosen.
“When the bus doesn’t come,” she said, “what they learn is that Baltimore doesn’t care if they get to school.”
Baltimore Banner data intern Katrina Ventura contributed to data visualizations in this story.
For all of the details of our data analysis, visit our GitHub.
