Trish Donahue of HopSkipDrive

Ed Tarnowski: Welcome back to the State of Choice podcast. I’m your host, Ed Tarnowski, also known as Ed with EdChoice. Joining me today, my colleague, Katherine Schultz, and we also have a guest today, which we’re really excited to introduce, Trish Donahue with HopSkipDrive.

Trish, why don’t you tell us a little bit about you, your background, and HopSkipDrive?

Trish Donahue: Sure. Thank you so much for having me. As you said, I’m Trish Donahue.

I’m our Senior Vice President of Legal and Policy at HopSkipDrive. I have been with the company actually now about six years, but prior to joining HopSkipDrive was really working in that cross-section of education law and education policy. As my title alludes, I am a lawyer by background, but while I was in law school, I started interning at the Colorado League of Charter Schools and then eventually worked at the Colorado Charter School Institute.

So from a personal space, choice has always been really important to me. I am a mom and it’s something that I want to flex in my own personal life. I mean, it’s really what drew me to HopSkipDrive.

Since I started as a legal intern at the League of Charter Schools, we were saying, well, choice isn’t really choice if you can’t get there. And so when HopSkipDrive was coming into Colorado, I became very attracted to the mission, really from a choice lens. And then as I got into the company, just realized the use case for what we’re doing in terms of getting youth and foster care to school, getting children experiencing homelessness to school, serving students with IEPs who maybe aren’t fitting along the bus route.

So my transportation world has certainly expanded in those last six years at HopSkipDrive.

Ed Tarnowski: Oh, that’s so exciting. And for our listeners who have not, maybe not heard of HopSkipDrive before, can you tell us a little bit more about how the model works with the transportation?

Trish Donahue: Sure. So HopSkipDrive is a rideshare service designed for kids. That has sort of been our core service, but we also have an intelligence platform for schools so that they can look at how they are getting their students to and from school every day and figure out how to better optimize their existing transportation infrastructure.

But at its core, we’ve been arranging rides for students across school districts. We really started actually in 2014 by three working moms trying to solve their own challenges of being a working parent and trying to get their kids to and from school and extracurricular activities in a way that was safe and reliable. And so they came up with this, man, I wish we could develop some sort of rideshare platform or solution that would be designed for kids and safe enough for us to use on our own children.

And so while we largely started with that sort of consumer-facing focus, since that time, we’ve largely transitioned to serving school districts and profit county child welfare agencies. And so now we’ve, you know, we partner with over 600 school districts and nonprofits and counties across the country. We do work in 17 states.

We’ve arranged more than 5 million rides across 95 million. It’s something we’re very proud of.

Ed Tarnowski: Yeah. And as you should be, and this is a really exciting time because as we’re seeing people get more excited about choice, more school choice spreading across the country and in different forms, particularly from the choice lens on private school choice, like education savings accounts, refundable tax credits, the need for transportation is only going to increase. And I know we hear we hear a lot of concerns often of in rural communities, how is choice going to help us if we’re too far from a school or if we can’t get our kids to school in the morning from a school that might be a little further than the one that’s right down the street, but they are looking for something a little different, a little bit different of a schooling model.

Can you tell us how this model might be able to help in states of rural communities embracing private school choice, ESA programs, things like that?

Trish Donahue: Sure. I mean, yeah, the reality is that over 53% of parents today get their kids to school in a private vehicle. And so when I think about HopSkipDrive, I think it’s really about meeting families where they’re at and increasing their leverage to actually exercise choice and options within their communities.

The yellow school bus is a huge component of student transportation, but it’s not the only component. And in fact, you know, it’s a minority of how kids actually are getting to school today. We’re trying to provide another transportation solution that is actually going to meet families where they’re at, which is largely getting kids to and from school in private vehicles right now.

Ed Tarnowski: That’s a great stat to mention. Here at EdChoice, we always say we are sector agnostic. Whatever schooling system is best for that kid, we think they should have access to it.

And that goes for the same with how they get to school. The yellow school bus works for a lot of kids, but for those families where it’s not the best choice, we ought to have innovation to get better choices and make sure we have something that works for every family’s different needs. So I want to turn to Katherine now.

Katherine, especially in her state, has seen massive success this year, big expansions to school choice and Hershey and her states tend to have a lot of rural communities. So I know that she has a lot to ask and say about this. So I want to turn it over to her to talk about those wins and how this might help in her states.

Katherine Schultz: Sure. Thanks, Ed. Well, of course, in Texas, we are so excited.

Just this last week, it looks like we are maybe one vote away from getting a school choice bill on its way to the governor’s office. We expect that concurrence to happen on Tuesday. But taking a step back from bill passage in Texas and Tennessee, when conversations about school choice began, it’s very much upon us to have to highlight the bigger picture of school choice.

So many members are so quick to say, okay, cool. We’ll just give you some funding and you can attend a private school. Where we at EdChoice have to say, not so much.

It’s not that simple. What we prefer is something called an education savings account and a way for students to utilize additional opportunities. Because like we all know, just putting a kid into a classroom is not the whole story of a kid’s educational day.

And so something that we fought very hard on in Tennessee and now, and hopefully the newly signed program in Texas, is having some additional funding for parents to use for things like HopSkipDrive. So in Texas, what we see is the existing ESA program that we believe is about to get signed by the governor would allow for approximately $10,500 per student into an ESA. What’s incredibly exciting about this is the average tuition in Texas or private school is about $9,500.

So that allows for additional funding to pay for things like uniforms, but also for things like transportation. Because one of the largest barriers to many students getting to the next school is how do you get there? How are mom and dad going to figure out a way for you to safely get to that other school?

And so places like HopSkipDrive, I’m so excited to collaborate with and further highlight because when I have legislators who are on the fence trying to really break them out of their old school thinking of schooling, an organization like yours allows me proof in the pudding to say, well, hold on. We already have an operator who has utilized a program just like this successfully to get students to the school that their mom and dad feel is best to meet their needs. And so my question to you is, do you all see a lot of success in states that already operate in school choice?

I think of Arizona, Arkansas, West Virginia. Are there states there that you’re already utilizing your program in?

Trish Donahue: Yeah. So we’re currently offering services in 17 states and growing. And many of those include very choice heavy states.

I’m a resident of Colorado. I know this landscape the most. Colorado is a very large market for us as is California, Washington, Texas, you know, many, many others who are already leveraging some choice systems in Arizona, of course.

And I think what’s really most exciting to us is, you know, finally seeing transportation become part of that conversation. It’s often almost hilariously overlooked, you know, that you can increase choice and you can increase access on paper. But if people don’t actually have the mechanism for getting there, it’s not going to move the needle.

And so we’ve actually been playing around a lot on the EdChoice ESA tracker to see where where those ESAs are now including transportation as an allowable expense so that we can start talking to people about it so that they understand their options. You know, I think I have to latch on, Katherine, to another issue that you were alluding to in your prelude there, which is that, you know, how kids get to school really matters in terms of how they’re set up for success. We know, for example, chronic absenteeism has led to reduced test scores.

And we also know that inaccess to transportation correlates to chronic absenteeism. We’ve also seen that families who have to, for example, increase time in transit have lower educational opportunities and lower test scores as well. So having a solution for families to actually have a door-to-door model is also critically important and needs to be part of the conversation for families who maybe the kid is spending two hours on city buses connecting them to school.

And we have to think about the inequity that that introduces as well if we want to see improved educational outcomes. Absolutely.

Katherine Schultz: How does HopSkipDrive connect to communities? How do you alert, you know, parents to say, hey, we’re here, please utilize us?

Trish Donahue: That’s a really good question. And so much of our focus has really been on making sure that our school and our school district partners how to access us. And then they really, you know, work to inform the communities.

But as we have grown in markets, certainly parents hear about us and they reach out to us to schedule rides on their own. You know, I think now we’re going, OK, how can we figure out how to make the platform very readily available for parents who might have access to an ESA? We know what states that’s happening and how do we make sure that they know where we’re operating and how they can access us?

So it’s a constant topic of conversation. We, of course, do things like local press so that people see us on the news and hear about us on the radio. But how do we really get in with the parent communities to make sure they understand all of their options is something that’s ongoing.

It’s very it’s something that is typically done best in person. And it takes a lot of time to invest in building those relationships. And we have a community engagement team under my organization here who does a lot of work talking to parents and getting them engaged on the issues.

Katherine Schultz: Very cool, because, you know, in Tennessee, we just passed a big school choice program there in February. It was signed into law. And I know that we’re looking at doing a big summit out there for implementation.

And so it’s certainly HopSkipDrive as a group I’d like to promote there, along with any other solutions just to further solidify, you know, legislators. They believe you when you say, look, there are options. But it’s so much more helpful to have members of the community saying, oh, no, the demand was here and here is the company that came in and provided the solution.

And it’s very helpful to illuminate that conversation. So I look forward to inviting you all to that as well.

Trish Donahue: Well, I appreciate the opportunity to speak about it as well, because there are also very few. I mean, to my knowledge, we’re really the only company that’s in the student transportation space that can also serve consumers directly. If you want to spend a whole other hour, I can talk about regulatory structure and how complex that makes it to be able to do both.

I’ll save that for another podcast. But, you know, that’s a really important service that we’re trying to offer as well. Whereas, you know, most others in the space, you can only access that transportation through a school district, whereas we actually do have a consumer facing application so that a parent can book directly through us while we’re still working with their local district as well.

Katherine Schultz: Well, and then on top of just getting to and from school, let’s say something happens and a parent needs some form of transportation to get a student from the school to their football game that’s across the way. Is that something HopSkipDrive can do also?

Trish Donahue: Yep, yep. We have one of the shortest booking windows in this space. We usually request a six hour booking window so we can make sure that we have a care driver signed up, ready to take the ride.

We would never want to leave a student without a driver, make sure they’re double confirmed. But yes, people use us for extracurriculars all the time. I mean, that’s really the inception of the company too, right?

Our CEO was one of our female co-founders and she needed a way to get her son to karate at three o’clock on a Thursday. That’s it. Yeah.

Katherine Schultz: Definitely part of the use case we’re filling. Oh, that’s excellent because that adds also to the expansion of showing lawmakers and parents what ESAs can be a part of. Because if you have funding there for transportation, many of the ESAs also allow for you to take maybe a concurrent enrollment classes where you could take classes at your local community college.

And so having that transportation piece, maybe mom and dad can get you to your private school that you want to attend. But then maybe something else like HopSkipDrive can then connect you to your junior college course. So very exciting.

Ed Tarnowski: Yeah, this is really exciting. And something we talk a lot about at EdChoice and to Katherine’s earlier point, one of the reasons that we’re so supportive and we emphasize maximizing options like ESAs instead of just traditional vouchers or other things is the innovation that comes out of it, creating a true marketplace of education. For so long, it was just a monopolistic system and it was always, well, this is how things have been done.

But this is a perfect example of choice and a marketplace of education, creating innovation and new ideas and new ways of that fit the unique needs of kids and parents. And I think the model itself is quite an innovation, but you guys are continuing to innovate in another area as well on efficiency. You guys have a new AI tool that reroutes plans for transportation officials.

I’d love to hear more about that.

Trish Donahue: Yeah, so the tool is called RouteWise AI. It’s relatively new for the company. It’s a full transportation intelligence platform for districts.

And really what that means is in a very secure environment, I will plug that we’re SOC 2, Type 2 compliant for our data security folks out there. That is really important to us and to the function of the platform. But basically, we capture district’s data, ridership data, how many drivers and vehicles do they have available?

What are their differing bell times? And through our systems, through our AI systems, coupled with very experienced analysts on the teams, we’re able to spit out recommendations for them that leverages their own data. They’re not going to get a recommendation of, oh yeah, increase your transportation budget by 100% and you’ll be great.

It’s going to reflect the fact that maybe they’re 20% below where they wanted to be on retaining school bus drivers this year. And so we’ll be able to spit out, we do spit out recommendations for them that accounts for their unique needs because we are still seeing, you know, since the pandemic, 15% fewer bus drivers than before the pandemic. So this is something that districts are still struggling with every single day.

I mean, I don’t envy the job of a transportation router or a director of transportation at a school district. It is a very difficult job. You know, you’re talking often thousands and thousands of kids, multiple bell schedules, several schools within the districts.

How do you serve all of those children efficiently and in a way that, you know, won’t detrimentally impact how kids are actually getting to school? And so our system can spit out recommendations and we’ve seen districts save up to 20% of their annual operating budgets when they use Routeways AI. And then those districts go and use those dollars to, you know, retain and incentivize school bus drivers or put it back into the educational system.

We’ve also seen that through our optimization systems, districts can reduce their tailpipe emissions by about 12% because they’re no longer putting eight kids on a 70-passenger bus. They’re putting eight kids, you know, into cars and saving emissions that way. So it’s been very exciting for the company.

We’ve gotten really great feedback thus far from the district partners who have utilized it, and we just hope to see more of it. You know, districts are continuing to face budget shortfalls. They’re in really difficult spots in terms of just funding their core education, let alone how they’re going to fund their transportation systems.

Ed Tarnowski: Awesome. Well, Trish, this is really exciting stuff. Trish, before we go today, do you have anything else to add that you want to leave with our listeners?

And how can they find out more about you and HopSkipDrive?

Trish Donahue: Well, thank you. Well, first I’ll say they can go to hopskipdrive.com to find out more about us. And I think the last thing that I want to say is let’s just keep making transportation part of the conversation.

And not just plain access to transportation, but let’s think about the child’s experience when they’re accessing that transportation. If they’re taking six-city buses, they’re probably not really set up for success when they get to school that day. And it’s something that we have to start thinking about.

Let’s meet families where they are and figure out how to do this in a way that, you know, will still be in line with district values and what they want to offer while meeting families where they are and making sure that kids can access their education well-rested and actually ready to start the school day.

Ed Tarnowski: Absolutely. Thank you so much for joining us today. It was a pleasure having you on.

Trish Donahue with HopSkipDrive. I hope you’ll go check out their work. And that will be it for this episode.

Thanks for listening. For more information on EdChoice and our research, feel free to visit edchoice.org and follow me on Twitter at Ed Tarnowski. I’m your host, Ed Tarnowski, also known as Ed with EdChoice.

See you next time.