Ohio public school districts must bus voucher students to private schools while canceling routes for their own high schoolers

Ohio law requires public school districts to transport K-8 students to private and charter schools, and to extend whatever transportation they offer their own high schoolers to every high schooler at a private or charter school in the same area. Since the state expanded its EdChoice universal voucher program, nearly 90,000 new students have been added over the past four years. Districts receive $1,500 per voucher student for transportation, but actual costs run far higher. Cleveland paid families of 2,739 students it deemed impractical to transport; Columbus paid for about 2,500. The mandate is unfunded in practice. The "so what" chain goes deep. Districts facing fixed budgets and a nationwide driver shortage must choose between running routes for voucher students (or face steep state fines) and running routes for their own public school high schoolers. In the 2025-2026 school year, multiple Ohio districts canceled high school bus routes entirely. Thousands of public school students lost rides. Parents were, in the words of Ohio's Attorney General, "forced to quit their jobs, rearrange their lives, and scramble for transportation." In Dayton, a judge had to intervene to temporarily restore a stopgap program giving students public transit passes. This problem persists because Ohio's transportation statutes were written decades ago when voucher programs were small and localized. The universal voucher expansion happened without updating transportation funding formulas or capacity requirements. Public districts bear the legal obligation to transport students they do not educate, with no mechanism to refuse or reallocate. The law treats transportation as a binary mandate rather than a finite resource, creating an impossible situation when driver supply cannot meet combined demand.