Legal Issues: Transporting Students with Disabilities Under IDEA

The IDEA and Transportation 

The IDEA requires school boards to provide related, or supportive, services, including transportation, to students with disabilities if needed to assist children in benefiting from their free appropriate public education (FAPEs). Transportation, as defined in the IDEA’s regulations, encompasses travel to, from, and between schools as well as in and around schools and other locations to receive services.  

Because the IDEA entitles students with physical and/or medical needs to specialized equipment such as adapted buses, lifts, and ramps or aides on vehicles to access transportation, a federal trial court in Michigan, for example, ordered a board to provide a bus aide for a child who was medically fragile because he needed such help.  

School boards typically provide transportation in district-owned and operated vehicles, in vehicles owned and operated by private service providers, and/or via public transportation. On occasion, boards may enter into contracts with parents to transport their children to and from school. In such a case, a federal trial court in Alabama rejected a mother’s claim that officials denied her daughter’s IDEA rights, where the board permitted her to transport the child to school because she often arrived late to class. The court noted that because any loss the child suffered due to her late arrivals at school was caused by her mother’s schedule rather than anything educators failed to do, the board was not liable.  

In a dispute involving a private school, a federal trial court in Pennsylvania granted parents’ motion for a judgment on the administrative record, where commonwealth law required transportation reimbursement for the placement of their son with disabilities at the private preschool at which he received his FAPE. The court also awarded the parents tuition reimbursement because the program the board offered failed to meet the student’s educational needs. 

An ongoing issue concerns where children who are entitled to transportation must be dropped off after school. In an early case from Texas, the Fifth Circuit ruled that a child was entitled to transportation to the home of a caretaker, even though that person lived outside of the district’s attendance boundaries. Conversely, the Eighth Circuit, in a later case from South Dakota, decided that a child was not entitled to be dropped off at a day care center outside of his school’s attendance area.  

In a second case before the Eighth Circuit, it affirmed that the IDEA did not require a board in Minnesota to reimburse the mother of a student who participated in an open-enrollment program for the cost of transporting her daughter between their home and the school of the parents’ choice. The court explained that the board had no obligation to pay for the cost of transportation because the mother chose to place her daughter in a school that was not located within the district. 

A 2024 case demonstrates that the term “transportation” is interpreted broadly, often involving more than trips to school. The Circuit Court for the District of Columbia affirmed that an eight-year-old with multiple disabilities who attended a charter school and used a wheelchair was entitled to door-to-door assistance in getting from his apartment door to a school bus.  

The court agreed both that the IDEA’s transportation requirement encompassed portal-to-portal assistance in getting the student from the door of his family’s apartment to the bus and that this duty fell on the local board rather than the charter school. 

Recommendations 

In light of the preceding, SBOs and their boards would be wise to consider the following suggestions when dealing with transportation for students with disabilities by: