Today I learned that Minnesota is among the states with the highest percentage of K–12 public school kids getting to school on a school bus:
That chart comes from this Washington Post story (gift link) about the great shift that has taken place in children being driven to school.
I wonder what, if anything, the states have in common that continue to have 75% or more of students arriving on buses?
The New England states are a coherent block (except what happened to Massachusetts and Rhode Island?). Pennsylvania is contiguous with New England if you include New York, which does pretty well if you consider that its average includes New York City kids, who are not as likely to ride school buses, given the mass transit options.
But why are West Virginia kids more likely than those in surrounding states, or kids in Mississippi? Though the percentage in each of those is not that much higher than some of their contiguous states.
The real outlier is Minnesota. We're often paired with Wisconsin demographically and come out similarly on statistics, so it's startling to see a big divergence here. The headline on the chart ("faster growing, spread-out states struggle to bus kids") doesn't fit the reality of Iowa or Wisconsin, either. They're not growing faster than Minnesota at all, and they're less spread out.
I thought we had way too many kids being driven to school, but this chart shows me that it's a lot worse in other nearby states. So that's depressing!
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