Let’s Show the Nation What Portlanders Can Do. Join Carpool to School.

A bus driver shortage means that community members must step up to ensure every student gets to school.

Research from 2012 revealed that “close to 1 in 5 students [in Oregon did] not attend school regularly and misse[d] essentially a month or more of schooling in a year.” Even if absenteeism rates have improved since then, the fact that Portland Public Schools (PPS) recently cut thirteen bus routes should rally the entire city to action to make sure we avoid repeating the past. In light of a bus driver shortage, PPS opted to cut these routes despite the fact that students that rely on these yellow buses have few alternatives. Five of the cancelled routes serviced students for whom TriMet rides would simply be too long to use to commute to class.

How will these students get to class?

PPS’s answer is you. That’s right — the district is encouraging community members to sign up for the Carpool to School app to create new transit options for students. The district’s other answer — the provision of just $14 per day for students to commute to school is really not an option. When was the last time you took a $14 day Uber or Lyft at rush hour?

Regardless of how you feel about the PPS plan, this is Portland’s moment to reverse the national headlines that have painted the Rose City as more thorny than beautiful. Portlanders have been painted as ready to protest, but unwilling to truly sacrifice for social justice, equality, and access to opportunity. The likes of the Wall Street Journal editorial board have eagerly covered every spat, every misstep, and every disagreement. Some of that coverage has been earned. The City of Portland can and must do better. Most of the coverage, though, has been exaggerated and spun to fit a narrative that Portlanders are out of control.

Let’s prove them wrong.

This shortage will not end soon according to the Oregonian. Portland’s students are counting on a sustained collective effort to ensure that they can get to school on time every single day.

The stakes could not be higher. These students have already missed their fair share of class time in a school year that’s already too short. Absent reliable transit, we’ll see students miss class, miss connecting with their friends, and miss out on the opportunities we promised to make available.

Want to prove to the Wall Street Journal that Portlanders do more than put up lawn signs? Then do your duty and help build a coalition of drivers dedicated to the education of our youth.

It’s easy to step aside—ignore the call—shirk a duty—take the selfish route —when that day of assessment is comfortably beyond the time of all living men. We don’t lie in separate generations anymore, well-insulated from each other by pages and pages of history. There are several generations of us here at once. IT is hard to face the questioning stare of one’s contemporaries.

Tom McCall’s challenge is more true today than when he first pushed Oregonians to collectively act back in the late 1960s. We cannot pretend that the action or inaction of today will not impact the immediate future of our students and of our city.

Grab your keys. Download the Carpool to School app. Let’s get every kid to class.

Kevin Frazier runs the Oregon Way between classes at the UC Berkeley School of Law and Harvard Kennedy School. He grew up in Washington County and graduated from the University of Oregon. In his spare time, he operates No One Left Offline, a nonprofit focused on closing the digital divide.

"Who's in Charge Here?" by born1945 is licensed under CC BY 2.0