Missing Bus, Missing School: Establishing the Relationship Between Public Transit Use and Student Absenteeism

Transportation is one of many potential obstacles that students might face as they attempt to attend school, but there are few opportunities to identify the unique contribution of transportation to school attendance. We apply models of commuting stress developed for adult commuters to students in an open enrollment school district to examine whether commuting difficulty plays a part in school absence. By comparing residentially stable students with themselves as they transition from eighth to ninth grade, we identify how changes in estimated school transportation are related to changes in attendance. We find that all students miss more days in high school than they did in middle school and that changing transit demands are associated with an increase in absences.