Disrupting the School Bus

While microschools and more make the news, how students get to their place of education—be those their core school or after-school learning opportunities—is a significant issue for many students and families. HopSkipDrive is changing that by creating a model in which caregivers can drive students with the result being a more flexible, safer, and affordable system of transportation to complement the big yellow bus. In this interview, HopSkipDrive founder Joanna McFarland shared more about the story behind HopSkipDrive, its current growth, and how to help regulators allow educators to embrace its benefits.

As always, you can listen to the post above, watch it below, or read the transcript.

Michael Horn:  Welcome to The Future of Education. I'm Michael Horn and I am extremely excited by today's conversation because we're living in this world, right now, where we're seeing a flourishing of more flexible schooling options for kids in a variety of formats, from a variety of actors that really transcend the one-size-fits-all history, if you will, of how schooling has always been done and the sense that it has to fit in a specific box with particular hours at a limited of flexibility and so forth.

                        And yet against that world of innovation, that I think is incredibly exciting, there's some real questions around how do we make sure that this is accessible and equitable to all individuals? And a big piece of that, I've come to learn, is simply transportation. How do we make sure that kids can get to these different schooling options, this array of learning opportunities, not just frankly in the school building, but throughout their day to open up these pathways and opportunities for them? And my guest today, Joanna McFarland, who's the co-founder and CEO of HopSkipDrive, is literally reinventing how kids access transportation and really creating an on-demand ride service for kids. She's probably going to give a much better explanation than that, but Joanna, first, welcome to The Future of Education. Thanks so much for being here.

Joanna McFarland: Thank you so much for having me.

Horn:                Yeah, so you can hear my enthusiasm because I think you're really reinventing one of these structures that we just assumed like everyone gets on the school bus or maybe they're lucky enough to walk and the hours are fixed and that's we don't think about it past then, but I'm seeing in lots of communities a lot of desire for more flexibility or maybe people want different start times or different schooling options, an array of things, and transportation becomes the major sticking point in the way of those innovation efforts. So I guess, I'm curious though, what caused you to start HopSkipDrive? What was the main motivation instead of use cases that you saw we need a different set of options for transportation?

McFarland:       So originally when we started HopSkipDrive, it actually had nothing to do with school transportation. It really had to do with creating options for full-time working moms and families, like mine, who were really struggling to just make the logistics of running a family work. I was trying to figure out how to get my son to karate on Thursday at three o'clock, and I came together with two other women. We are all moms, we have eight kids between us and we were just dying, and those eight kids went to five different schools. And so we were all just really struggling with how to get them to school, how to get them to after-school activities, how to maintain our jobs, how not to run out of work at three o'clock to make this all happen. And really designed it from the ground up with that idea in mind, with creating flexibility, with creating optionality while also laying a foundation for safety.

                        We asked ourselves from the beginning, what does this need to look like for me to put Jackson or Sam in a HopSkipDrive? What do I want to see as a parent? And how do you devise and design a system and a technology that is designed around the idea that the person in the vehicle is not the person who arrange the ride, may or may not have a phone, and is a little bit more vulnerable. And that's really where it came from. We started as a consumer business. We pretty quickly realized that there was this world of school transportation and that it was a very large world and that it was really broken, even before COVID, that it was not efficient and that there were... We started with some of the hardest to serve students, students experiencing homelessness, students in the foster system, and students with special needs whose IEP included transportation to a different school.