Late and crowded buses have an impact on more than adults commuters needing to get to work on time – they make it a struggle for city students to get to school every day and mean kids are often late for class.

Here are links to two recent features on this subject, one an audio documentary produced for WYPR’s Maryland Morning and the other a youth-made video called “The Journey to School,” produced by New Lens and Wide Angle Media.

In “No Yellow Buses Here: One Student’s MTA Commute,” producer Jonna McKone joins a Digital Harbor High School student as she makes her way to school from her West Baltimore home rising, as she does ever day, at 5:30 a.m.

“There’s two of ’em coming. That means one of them’s late,” the student says, as they stand at a stop across from a liquor store looking for the #15.

McKone and the student make it onto the bus, but then after a making a transfer watch others who weren’t so lucky: “The bus is packed and we just passed a lot of students.”

 

On the 2013 documentary “The Journey to School,” students are asked to describe their commute to school and it’s tiring just listening to some of them.

“I take the 27 [bus] to the Light Rail and go from Cherry Hill to North Avenue and then catch the 13 up,” one girl says. Asked how long that takes every day, each way, she answers: one-and-a-half hours.

The producers of these pieces try to get information from the Maryland Transit Administration, which runs the local bus service in Baltimore, but the lack of information available is striking.

McKone asks the MTA’s Michael Walk for the average commute time for students, how often students have to transfer, whether students are traveling more than a half a mile to get to their high school. The agency, she learned, doesn’t have that data. The Baltimore City Public Schools also told her they don’t keep those numbers.

“Actually,” said Walk, MTA’s director of service development, “we haven’t looked at that data ourselves.” He goes on to say that they may do so.

Is there hope here?

The WYPR piece interviews Sue Fothergill, a senior policy associate with Attendance Works, a group pushing to make a point that could propel change.

Research shows, Fothergill notes, that attendance – including getting to school on time – is strongly linked to academic success.