Transportation directors are heading into the 2026/27 school year carrying more weight than usual. Budgets are tighter, but meanwhile, operational costs have not stopped climbing. Meanwhile, the students who depend most on reliable transportation—students with additional needs, McKinney-Vento students, students in foster care—are not going anywhere.
This is the environment that nearly 200 transportation directors described when EverDriven, in partnership with School Transportation News, surveyed them for the State of Student Transportation: 2026/27 Budget Survey. What they shared was candid, practical, and important. The numbers behind their answers help explain what “do more with less” actually looks like on the ground, and why the decisions being made right now will shape student access to education for years to come.
Understanding the Budget Pressure
The headline finding from the survey is straightforward: nearly one in three transportation directors (32%) expect their budgets to decrease in the coming year. For most of them, the drivers are largely outside their control. Sixty-two percent point to district-wide budget cuts, and 50% cite declining state and federal funding as a primary cause. For 27% of departments, rising operational costs are pulling resources away from transportation directly, compounding pressure that was already significant.
The picture is uneven, but not as reassuring as it might appear. Twenty-six percent of respondents expect flat budgets, but stable funding in a rising-cost environment is its own kind of pressure. Delivering the same service, to the same students, with the same dollars while fuel, vehicle maintenance, and driver compensation all increase is not a neutral outcome. The directors in this survey understand this, which is why cost control sits at the top of nearly every priority list they shared.
Why Budget Pressure is Bigger Than Your District’s Balance Sheet
The challenges that transportation directors are navigating did not emerge from a single policy decision or a single budget cycle. They are the product of multiple converging pressures arriving at the same time, and the national context makes the local picture even harder.
The proposed FY26 federal budget included $12 billion in cuts to public education, with proposals that would eliminate or consolidate funding for programs supporting the country’s most vulnerable students. According to the Education Law Center, those cuts would fall hardest on the districts least equipped to absorb them. At the same time, mandated services, including special education transportation and McKinney-Vento support, continue to grow, even as the overall funding environment tightens. Districts do not have the option of scaling back services for students who are legally entitled to them. They absorb the pressure elsewhere.
The 50% of directors in this survey who cited state and federal funding reductions as a key driver are not outliers. They are part of a national pattern that shows no clear signs of easing, and the districts on the front lines of that pattern are making hard decisions every day.
What “Do More With Less” Really Means on the Ground
When we asked transportation directors to name their greatest priority heading into 2026/27, 65% gave the same answer: control costs while maintaining service levels. That the dominant mandate across the field, named by nearly two-thirds of directors above every other concern.
The difficulty is that maintaining service levels is itself getting harder. Driver shortages remain one of the most persistent structural challenges in student transportation. Fifty-three percent of directors rank driver recruitment and retention as a top priority, and among those whose budgets are actually increasing in the coming year, 56% say the first place those new dollars are going is toward driver compensation and retention. The shortage is not a temporary problem, and it is not solving itself.
Meanwhile, enrollment is shifting in ways that complicate transportation planning. Forty-four percent of directors expect student enrollment to increase, while 23% expect a decrease. Fifty-three percent attribute those shifts to residential and demographic changes in their communities. Routes designed around last year’s enrollment may not serve next year’s students efficiently. And the students who need transportation most, such as those with additional needs, McKinney-Vento students, and students in foster care, are often the hardest to serve through traditional fixed-route systems alone.
When transportation budgets are cut without a clear strategy, service gaps form. And the students who bear the cost of those gaps are rarely the ones with the most options.
Three Ways Districts are Responding
Transportation directors are not waiting for conditions to improve before making changes. Across the survey, three responses stand out as the most common strategic moves heading into 2026/27.
1. Rethinking Route Structures
Forty-six percent of directors are already adjusting or consolidating bus routes in response to enrollment changes. This is about right-sizing service rather than cutting it. A full-size bus running near capacity on a dense suburban route makes strong logistical and economic sense. That same bus making multiple stops to serve two or three students in a low-density area, or running a dedicated route for a student with complex medical needs, is a different problem that benefits from a different solution. Route consolidation opens the door to a more honest evaluation of where traditional buses are the right tool and where a more flexible approach would serve students better.
2. Investing in Routing and Dispatch Technology
Thirty-seven percent of directors are prioritizing routing, tracking, and dispatching technology as a key investment area. This is worth paying attention to, because the value of that investment extends beyond day-to-day efficiency. The data generated by smarter routing systems becomes the evidentiary foundation for stronger budget requests in future cycles. When transportation directors can show administrators and school boards exactly how routes are performing and what service changes have produced measurable outcomes, they are making the case for their budgets based on real evidence.
3. Partnering with Alternative Student Transportation Providers
Ten percent of directors are actively increasing their use of alternative student transportation, deploying it where it can relieve the most strain without requiring additional drivers or expanding district fleet costs. For specialized populations, including students with additional needs, McKinney-Vento students, and students placed out of district, alternative transportation offers something a traditional bus system often cannot: flexibility, consistency, and service tailored to individual student needs. Smaller vehicles, familiar drivers, and adaptable routing can make the transportation experience itself more supportive for students whose needs the yellow bus was not designed to accommodate.
How EverDriven Helps Districts Do More With LessHow EverDriven Helps Districts Do More With Less
For many districts, one of the largest and least visible sources of inefficiency is fragmentation. Bus routes, van routes, and alternative transportation runs are often planned and managed separately, by different teams using different systems, with no shared view of how all the pieces fit together. When enrollment shifts, when a driver is unavailable, or when a student’s needs change mid-year, those disconnected processes create compounding delays and costs that are difficult to track and harder still to fix quickly.
EverDriven works alongside district transportation systems through two integrated capabilities designed for exactly this environment: Consolidated Routing Services that unify and optimize how every vehicle in a district’s fleet operates, and flexible Alternative Student Transportation that fills the gaps a fixed-route bus cannot efficiently reach.
Consolidated Routing Services starts with a genuine collaboration. EverDriven’s routing consultants learn how your district currently operates, including its goals, pain points, district rules, and the areas where improvement is most needed. From there, the team builds and executes a planning schedule to recreate, refine, or adjust routes ahead of the school year, while re-tiering and repackaging the yellow bus fleet to maximize resources already in place.
Before the first routes launch, EverDriven runs a real-world dry run, testing routes for feasibility, timing, and overall efficiency in the actual streets where students will travel. Districts that have adopted this model have seen route costs decrease by up to 15%, alongside measurable improvements in on-time performance. A dedicated routing consultant visits quarterly to review performance, address emerging challenges, and help teams plan more confidently for the next budget cycle.
For students with additional needs, McKinney-Vento students, and students in foster care, EverDriven’s alternative transportation fills the routes that fixed-route systems cannot efficiently reach without adding drivers or fleet costs. Consistent drivers, flexible routing, and rigorous safety standards mean that the students with the least margin for error are served with the most care. Over the past 12 months, EverDriven recorded zero critical incidents, with 99.99% of trips completed without accident and 90.36% of trips arriving within five minutes of scheduled drop-off.
For district administrators and transportation directors, TripCentral provides real-time visibility into trip status, ride history, and reporting without adding administrative burden to your team. You get the data you need to manage service and make the case for your budget, without building new systems to get it.
The 2026/27 environment demands partners who reduce complexity, not add to it. EverDriven is built to help transportation leaders do exactly that. Ready to see how EverDriven can support your district’s transportation strategy?
Danielle Press is a results-driven sales and growth executive with nearly two decades of experience building high-performing teams, scaling revenue, and transforming how organizations go to market. As Chief Growth Officer at EverDriven, she leads the company’s growth strategy with the same intensity and people-first mindset that has defined her career.
Danielle’s path to the C-suite is a masterclass in earning it from the ground up. She began her career in field sales and progressed through coaching, inside sales leadership, and regional management, taking on increasingly complex roles and delivering consistent growth at every stage. Among her most notable achievements: she took what was ranked the worst sales team in the country to the best performing, by focusing relentlessly on talent development, sales acumen, and culture. In a later role, she built a net-new inside sales motion that generated 35% of all new business revenue while cutting customer acquisition costs in half.
At the peak of her pre-EverDriven career, Danielle drove some of the most significant commercial milestones in her organization’s history, growing total revenue 5x, net revenue 7x, improving net retention by 40%, and closing the largest deal in company history by a factor of five.
Beyond her professional accomplishments, Danielle is a passionate advocate for women in sales leadership, having spent nearly five years as a mentor with #GirlsClub, a program dedicated to developing and certifying the next generation of female sales managers.
