It’s Not Going to Happen

On a Friday morning in November I called the school district’s transportation office to ask how my son Cole, a seventh grader in a wheelchair, could get to school, and the supervisor gave me the answer before I had finished the question: it’s not going to happen.

His wheelchair, she explained, is not “DOT approved.” I asked whether the district supplies one that is, and was told probably, for some low-income families. I offered to buy the right chair that weekend, and learned that it would then need an inspection, that there were two other children to transport, that there was the union to consider, and that Ladera Ranch doesn’t currently have a bus going that way in any case. By the end of the call I had offered to buy medical equipment for a public agency and been turned down.

Some background. On November 5 Cole was hit by a car while riding his bike to school for zero period. He broke his tibia, had surgery with plates and screws, and will be in a wheelchair for about two months, with a second surgery to come. The district has since classified this, on a form, as a “transitory and minor” impairment. He was on his bike that morning for the same reason most Ladera kids are on a bike, an e-bike or the back seat of a parent’s car, which is that there is no bus.

I’ll own my part. I had assumed the buses disappeared because of some green mandate out of Sacramento, and I was wrong. When I read the bills, the climate argument turned out to run the other way: the 2022 proposal to put every California student on a free bus listed fewer cars on the road as one of its selling points.

What actually happened is older and duller. California froze what it pays districts for busing in the early 1980s and left it there for forty years. Capistrano Unified adopted a fee policy in 1996, cut service for 4,000 to 5,000 riders in 2008, and then eliminated two-thirds of its regular routes, taking 4,500 families off the bus to keep the cuts out of classrooms. What survives costs $575 a year per child. By 2022 a transportation expert was telling legislators that California ranked last in the nation for school bus funding and that fewer than one in ten students rode.

Then, in 2022, the money showed up. A bill to guarantee every student a free ride passed the state Senate 28 to 1 and was traded for a compromise: $637 million a year in new funding and a promise to reimburse districts up to 60 percent of what they spend getting kids to school. Capistrano’s own audit shows $12.7 million in home-to-school transportation spending the following year, and by the state’s formula a meaningful share of that should be coming back.

Here is what I can’t find, and I have looked: how much the state has reimbursed Capistrano since 2022, how much of that $12.7 million pays for the routes the law requires versus the neighborhood routes that were cut, how many of those routes exist today, and what the district collects in bus pass fees. I am filing a public records request for those numbers and will print what comes back.

Meanwhile the kids are getting to school the way kids will. Mission Hospital treated 255 e-bike trauma cases last year, most of them children, and at CHOC e-bike injuries went from one patient in 2021 to 201 in 2025, enough to make them the leading reason kids land in its trauma ER. I can’t tell you a bus would have prevented any one of those, and I won’t pretend to. I can tell you that when the routes were cut, the district’s own transportation director said students are safer on buses than in cars.

Thousands of Capistrano kids will get themselves to school on Monday whether or not a bus comes, which makes “it’s not going to happen” less an answer than a decision about who carries the risk.

If your child has been hurt on the way to a CUSD school, or you have already pulled these records, write to us at The Bubble. And if you sit on the school board, I have five questions and a seventh grader who would like a ride.

Sources: Patch on the CUSD route cuts · ABC7 on the 2008 cuts · CUSD bus pass information · School Transportation News on the 2022 state budget · CUSD 2023 audit · Rady Children’s e-bike safety guide