 Wake up, son. Wake up, wake up. When Christina Laster moved to Palm Springs, California in 2020, she considered sending her son, Daniel, to the local elementary school. I saw a school across the street from my house, so I started to think, well, maybe he could go to the district school. But at Julius Corsini Elementary, the students score well below the state average in English and math. There was no way that I was going to send my son to a filling school. So Daniel attends Palm Academy, which is part of the spring's charter school network. Like all charters, the school is publicly funded, so there's no tuition bill. And Laster feels it's well equipped to serve Daniel's special needs. And we leave around 7 o'clock. I drive 35 minutes to 40 minutes away. Because it's a charter, Palm Academy accepts students from as far away as the next county over. The problem is it doesn't provide transportation. Having the lack of transportation to get our children to school is hurting the need for the resources for single parents like myself and low income families. We need them the most, but yet we still don't have them available. And this is a nationwide problem that limits parental choice. Although it varies by district, about two-thirds of states don't require districts to provide transportation for charter school students. Like many things in public education, the orientation that school districts and the public sector tends to have towards school transportation is that the clients are the schools or the school districts rather than the clients or the parents and what they need. Andrew Rotherham is a co-founder at the nonprofit Bellwether Education Partners, which has been studying how school transportation limits parental choice. A lot of places, it's a struggle for parents to get their kids to a charter school in suburbs that are very car-dependent where people may have to go great distances. Choices start to become out of reach. In the group, it was substantial for low-income minority kids end up going the furthest to get to schools. That's a function of parents being in communities where they may not have a schooling option that they want and having to go a great distance to avail themselves of one. Okay, ready to go? I'm going to think in Jesus' name we pray, amen. Have a good day. After I drop him off at school, I'll just go to the park. Typically I'll spend my whole day there in meetings back-to-back or on phone calls. I don't have any Wi-Fi at the park. If I have these in the bathroom, I'll just go to the park bathroom. The longest hours that I've sat in the car at the park are from 8.30 in the morning to 4.30. If Daniel was provided with transportation to get to school, I could do my work more efficiently. Hi, my name is Christina Laster. I'm the director of policy and legislation with the National Parents Union. Laster, who spent nearly 13 years in the San Diego public school system, now works in education reform. There's no funding from the state of California that is offered to charter schools for transportation. It's not even a line item on their budget. We have a local control funding formula. We have what is called the local control and accountability plan and there are no resources granted for public charter schools. Opponents might say the state already has offered parents an education that's close to their home. That's what zoned neighborhood schools are. Why should they be required to transport kids to another neighborhood or another county just because their parents are dissatisfied with local schools? It really comes down to what is your vision for the public education system. The school choice argument is actually the system should be responsive to the parents. They are the ultimate stakeholders. That's how you preserve political support for public education. I would never send Daniel to the district school because I know what that's like. I've been there before with him. We've experienced what the data shows. Before they relocated to Palm Springs, Daniel was enrolled in a public school in the town of Lake Elsinore. Laster sued the school for mistreatment and for failing to meet Daniel's learning needs. Shortly after the case was settled, they moved away because Laster said she was the victim of domestic violence. By the time Daniel was in first grade, the teacher mistreated him. By the second grade, he was emotionally vanquished. He had suicidal ideations and he didn't want to go to school every day. And so I decided to immediately pull him out of that school in that school district and homeschool him. But after probably about a year and a half, I recognized that that can become very expensive. And one of those years, I enrolled him in Springs Public Charter School. Remember how much time you have, right, Daniel? Three hours. Two. If we were to look at what happens with African American or black males in this country, if they're able to read and write and if they're excessively punished, that's what we call the school-to-prison pipeline. I don't want my son on the school-to-prison pipeline. I want him to stay on the path he's at grade level. He's not failing in English, language, arts, or math. Which is huge for fifth grade black boys in the state of California. Despite Daniel's academic progress, Laster is considering homeschooling him again to avoid the commute. The Springs Charter School Network offers programs that support homeschool families and study at home education. School transportation, for a lot of people, it's like the plumbing in your house. It's not something you think about much until it doesn't work. The pandemic has forced that to the fore. A lot of people are paying attention to school transportation because of these shortages and so forth. But these are long-standing issues of a system that just doesn't work as well as it could, but kind of is in the background and people aren't thinking about. And some of these issues we're seeing now around choice and parents wanting different things are going to bring that to the surface. I especially believe that for parents like myself that are single parents, being able to be offered a resource to allow their kids to get to that quality school, you know, of their choosing is a must. Hi, everybody. I am not going to be on camera. I'm going to be multitasking, but I'm present in the meeting. I've done everything that I possibly can within a day. I can become very overwhelmed. I want my son to be educated. I want my son to have upward mobility. So I sacrifice now to make sure that he has the best outcomes possible later in life.