Getting to School: Transportation, Land Use, and the Geography of Educational Access

Mathew Palmer, a land use and transportation planner, serves as the director of the SchoolCAMP — School and Community Aligned Master Planning — project at NC State University.  He has spent two decades exploring a question at the nexus of transportation and school planning: how do children get to school safely, efficiently, and comfortably enough that they arrive at the schoolhouse door ready to learn?

Palmer came to planning through a classroom. In the mid-2000s, he taught high school in South Central Los Angeles at a charter school that drew students from across Los Angeles county. Every morning, he watched them arrive — after walking, busing, training, busing, and walking again. 

When Palmer eventually left the classroom to pursue a career in transportation planning, this challenge became his motivation: “More influential than what I could do in the classroom was [what I could do about] their trip to school,” Palmer says. 

Palmer’s early research determined that over the course of their K12 education, a student would undertake more than 5,000 individual trips. The magnitude of that number—and what it implies for students’ lived experience—led Palmer to focus on the space between home and school. The goal: to answer the question “How do we plan in an integrative way for kids, communities, and schools?”

The access gaps Palmer observed in South Central are by no means unique to Los Angeles, and carry real costs. Research shows that student achievement, health, wellbeing can be compromised by longer and more complicated commutes; absenteeism and tardiness rise, and more time spent commuting can mean less time for sleep, homework, and extracurricular activities. Increased absenteeism is particularly likely for students who have to navigate unsafe routes to school. 

These outcomes, Palmer explains, stem from a planning paradigm that is fragmented and not human-centered. “We went a little too Robert Moses and not enough Jane Jacobs,” Palmer says of 20th century regional planning approaches across the United States. “School siting is a transportation problem and land use problem,” he said, but school siting decisions and transportation decisions happen in different rooms. Districts rarely take an integrative, student- and family-centered approach to the question of how to reduce barriers to school access.

Palmer said that, generally speaking, district planners, transportation directors, and facilities teams all operate in what he calls “a defensible posture,” optimizing the elements of school planning that they are each uniquely responsible for. But this means that different departments within a single district can end up developing and implementing plans that create new problems for students in the process of solving other problems. Palmer contends that districts would be better served by undertaking a more intentional process that connects the dots between facilities and transportation needs while centering student — and community — experience.

Palmer’s work at NC State builds exactly that integrative function. The SchoolCAMP  program brings enrollment forecasters, facilities specialists, transportation engineers, academic program planners, and food systems experts into a shared process — anchored in what a community says it actually needs. 

The team starts by facilitating connections among district, municipal, and (where appropriate) county leadership. Palmer and his SchoolCAMP colleagues also provide leaders with important data, such as current population data, demographic projections, and school facilities capacity and conditions data. 

Then, members of the broader community join the conversation. Voices from these diverse positions work together to diagnose the community’s greatest educational needs, identify shared goals, and surface the likely outcomes—both negative and positive—of any proposed course of action on different constituencies across the community. 

Only after this rich, data-informed process of problem identification and solution-seeking is complete does Palmer and his team start mapping out strategies for the district to consider. SchoolCAMP helps districts model the potential impacts of redrawing school boundaries, optimizing bus routes, or undertaking new construction. And, they recommend these considerations be iterative, with multiple cycles of community engagement and refinement in order to “move toward great schools, thriving kids, and strong communities.”

For example, SchoolCAMP’s collaboration with the Durham, North Carolina public schools shows the types of powerful impacts of an integrative approach to planning. When Palmer first started working with Durham, the district’s longstanding attendance boundaries dated back to 1992, when a politically unpopular city-county merger scarred the district’s reputation and reinforced pre-existing segregation. Palmer’s team redesigned those boundaries in a way that shortened average trip lengths and improved demographic integration at the same time. At every step of the way, Palmer and the SchoolCAMP team pushed themselves to honor both elements of that equation by asking: “Are equity and efficiency contradictory notions, or are there ways that we can privilege both?” The approach they used in Durham serves as a model for increasing educational equity while improving operational efficiency.

Palmer asserts that “the two levers for economic and social mobility are public education and public transportation.” When planners treat transportation needs, facility needs, and community needs as distinct problems, the communities with the least margin bear the costs. But when planners and districts approach access to school as part and parcel of the educational project, he says that “those investments in our facilities and our kids yield the most public good.” When school transportation improves, student experience and learning improve.