Ed Source – Jane Meredith Adams
“Students who ride the school bus in the critical first year of formal education – kindergarten – are absent less often and have lower odds of being chronically absent, a key indicator of future academic success, according to a new study. The “school bus effect” improves kindergarten attendance in families of all income levels, said UC Santa Barbara professor Michael Gottfried, who conducted the study in partnership with the Truancy Reduction Pilot Projects initiative of California Attorney General Kamala Harris. The unpublished study, “Linking Getting to School with Going to School,” used a nationally representative sample of 14,000 kindergartners drawn from U.S. Department of Education data. It is believed to be the first to quantify the effect of school bus transportation on chronic absenteeism.”(more)