Laguna Schools Run on School Buses

A guide to bus passes, safety improvements and the future of student transportation for Laguna Beach.

LBUSD bus passes for the 2026–27 school year go on sale tomorrow, August 1, and my first advice to new and returning families is to spend some time on the District’s transportation webpage.

The District has done a great job putting a lot of key information in one place. Families can find prices, routes, designated stops, pre-kindergarten (TK) and high school options, BusZone app instructions, safety rules, FAQs, public transit alternatives, repair logs, and CHP inspection reports. Transportation information is often scattered across the school district, its contractor, and multiple public agencies, so having a single page that parents can use is a great asset from the District.

Passes will be available to purchase for about two weeks, from August 1 through August 16. Sales will then close for one week while the District finalizes routes and prints passes, and reopen August 24 for the rest of the school year. Passes generally take two business days to process and are given to students at their schools (on the first day if you order it early enough).

The price has increased to $260 each way, or $520 for annual round-trip service. The District offers installment payments for annual passes purchased before school begins, and prices are prorated as the year goes on. A Friday-only morning pass for Thurston is $87.50, and temporary one-week passes cost $30.

Families who cannot afford the cost should know that no-cost round-trip passes are available based on state income guidelines. Applications can be submitted throughout the year, though applying before school begins gives the District more time to understand demand while routes are still being adjusted. Qualifying families can receive District-paid transportation for the full school year and may also request passes for next summer’s programs.

One reason transportation matters so much in LBUSD is the sheer percentage of students it serves.

In the 2025-26 school year, 964 students used the bus service, including 933 general-education students and 31 special-education students. In a district of roughly 2.2k students, approximately 42% rely on District transportation.

That is an unusually large share compared with nearby districts. Irvine Unified transports about 4% of their students, while Newport-Mesa transports about 11%.

I have worked in transportation planning for over 15 years, so I probably think about school buses differently than most parents. There is the route design, driver availability, passenger capacity, service reliability, vehicle trips, public funding, and what happens when a family does not have a parent available to fill every gap in the system.

Last August, however, I was also simply a new District mom putting her 4-year-old on a school bus for the first time. While I was nervous, it wasn’t because of the big yellow bus, but just because my little “baby” was now in elementary school.

School buses are extraordinarily safe. They are extremely regulated and designed specifically to protect children through their size, visibility, reinforced construction, protective seating, flashing lights, mirrors and stop arms. Federal safety research has found that students are nearly eight times safer riding a school bus than traveling with their parents or guardians in cars. In fact, it’s been 31 years since a child has died in an accident on a traditional school bus.

I understood all of that when I watched my son climb aboard, but what I did not know was how much he would love it.

The bus became one of the best parts of his day, and a huge part of that was the drivers. They learned his name, greeted him every morning, established a routine, and made him feel safe. A school bus driver does so much more than operate a large vehicle through traffic — they are the trusted adult who receives our children from us in the morning, delivers them safely to school, and brings them back at the end of the day.

Our drivers are the best, and their role should not be treated as incidental to the service. For young children especially, the driver is the face of the entire transportation system.

The bus stop also became something I did not fully anticipate: an easy way to meet other parents and get to know our neighbors. Instead of passing one another anonymously in separate cars, we see the same families each morning and afternoon. Children get to know students from different grades, while parents exchange information, help when someone is late, and build friendships with people they might otherwise never meet.

These things do not appear in a transportation budget, but they are real. The bus gives children independence, creates a small neighborhood community, and makes the school system feel more connected to where families live.

That connection is especially important for families in Laguna Audubon and Newport Coast.

Laguna Audubon is located within the City of Aliso Viejo, but it is fully part of LBUSD. Families there belong to the District every bit as much as families living inside Laguna Beach proper. The same is true for LBUSD families in Newport Coast.

Still, I understand why living slightly outside Laguna Beach can sometimes make the District feel more difficult to access. The schools, meetings, activities, and much of the social life surrounding LBUSD are centered in Laguna Beach, and families may not already be driving into town for the rest of their daily lives.

Transportation helps shrink that distance.

For the last four years, the District has had about 465 students in Newport Coast, Laguna Audubon, and Laguna Beach communities on El Toro Blvd. Those students attend every school in the District, including about 150 at Laguna Beach High School, 110 at Top of the World, 105 at El Morro, and 100 at Thurston.

I believe transportation is part of educational opportunity, as it affects whether students arrive reliably, working parents can maintain their schedules, and older students can participate in programs with some independence. It also affects whether students can stay for CTE, academic support, clubs, athletics, enrichment, and other opportunities that do not fit neatly between the morning and afternoon bells.

In transportation, the existence of a route is only the beginning; it has to operate when people need it, reach the destination they are actually trying to access, provide a reasonable way home, and communicate clearly when something changes.

Laguna Beach’s location makes that unusually difficult.

We have steep neighborhoods, canyon communities, coastal congestion, limited road connections, and only four primary school campuses. Walking and bicycling should always be supported where they are safe and realistic, but neither can provide a complete transportation solution for many LBUSD students.

California is already built around personal vehicles, and Laguna is particularly isolated. When PCH, Laguna Canyon Rd, or El Toro Blvd becomes congested, families have very few meaningful options. That makes every credible alternative to driving alone in a car for every trip extremely valuable.

School buses are one part of that system, but the City has also done a great job pursuing funding and developing public transportation around Laguna’s unusual geography. While OCTA provides regional connections and Youth Ride Free passes, the City operates fully subsidized trolleys and Laguna Local microtransit.

In 2024, Laguna Beach secured $7.2 million through OCTA’s Project V program to support and expand local trolley and Laguna Local service. Project V exists because conventional regional transit cannot efficiently meet every local mobility need, particularly in communities with unique geography and travel patterns.

These services each have a different role: school buses provide scheduled transportation for students, OCTA connects Laguna with the wider region, trolleys serve predictable corridors and community destinations, and Laguna Local helps fill gaps in lower-density neighborhoods.

Laguna Local microtransit cannot replace scheduled school transportation for every student, particularly younger children or families who need a guaranteed arrival time. The on-demand service is inherently different from a bus that arrives at a designated stop on a school schedule; however, it remains an important part of the larger network and offers older students and families another option when their needs fall outside a traditional school bus route.

Together, these services provide a public benefit that extends well beyond the individual rider. Bus-pass revenue helps offset the cost of school transportation, but the program also supports attendance, educational access, working families, student independence, and safer school circulation.

They also reduce vehicle trips, which is one of the most important benefits for the Laguna Beach community.

A well-used school bus consolidates many individual drop-offs and pickups. Not every student riding the bus represents one eliminated car trip, because some parents would carpool or combine school runs with work or other errands. Collectively, however, school buses reduce vehicle miles traveled, idling, curbside congestion, parking demand, and the number of cars moving around our streets during the busiest parts of the day.

Fewer vehicles also result in fewer conflicts with children walking or bicycling near schools.

It goes to show how families who never buy a bus pass still benefit from school transportation. They get to have shorter drop-off lines, safer arrival areas, less competition for curb space, and fewer vehicles entering already-constrained roads.

This does not mean the District should accept poor performance or unclear spending. Transportation can be a publicly subsidized service and still be expected to operate efficiently. LBUSD should know what it is paying for, monitor contractor performance, and expect reliable vehicles, functioning air conditioning, clear communication, accurate information, and timely responses when problems occur.

Families should also understand that routes are not set permanently. Enrollment changes, children move between schools, program schedules shift, and neighborhoods gain or lose riders.

The late-start TK families in Laguna Audubon are a good example of why parents should speak up when a route does not reflect the trip students actually need.

The school bus service was already operating from the Boys & Girls Club to Top of the World Elementary for late-start TK students, but every child riding that bus lived in Laguna Audubon. Their parents were driving them from Laguna Audubon to the Boys & Girls Club, almost a halfway point, just so they could board the bus.

Families explained why that did not make sense and advocated extending the route into Laguna Audubon. The District reviewed the service and made the change.

The route continued to use a full-size bus, which may initially sound excessive for only a few young students, but the driver and service time are generally the highest operating costs. Once the driver and bus are already performing the trip, replacing the vehicle with something smaller creates little meaningful savings. Expanding this particular route allowed the service to reflect where the riders actually lived and left room for future demand.

Not every request can be accommodated, and route changes must take into account staffing, timing, vehicle availability, cost, and the effect on other riders. Families can still advocate for themselves, particularly when several students share the same transportation barrier. The District cannot evaluate a need it does not know exists.

Several improvements developed over the past year should also be visible during 2026–27.

The buses have upgraded their cameras, which improves coverage and makes recordings easier to retrieve when a safety or behavioral concern needs to be reviewed. Paid bus monitors have also been approved for funding, adding another adult who can focus on students while the driver focuses on safely operating the vehicle.

A replacement for the BusZone app is also being tested. I am encouraged that the District is trying another option, but I also want to see how it performs in the real world before assuming it solves the problems families had last year.

A transportation app should not require parents to become experts in the technology and should be able to identify the correct bus, provide accurate location information, and deliver meaningful updates when a route is delayed, detoured, or changed. Passenger information is part of the transportation service itself. Families are less likely to trust and use the bus when they cannot confidently say where it is or whether anything has happened to it.

Laguna Beach Unified’s next major transportation challenge will be electrifying the fleet.

Alongside the District’s 2030 carbon-neutrality commitment, California will require newly purchased or newly contracted school buses to be zero-emission, where feasible, beginning in 2035. Because LBUSD contracts with Durham, the transition must be addressed through future agreements as well as utility and infrastructure planning.

California’s newer school buses are already much cleaner than older diesel models, but electric buses would eliminate tailpipe emissions while preserving the vehicle-trip reduction that makes shared transportation valuable in the first place.

This transition is more than buying buses, as LBUSD and Durham will need to account for route mileage, hills, heating and air-conditioning demand, charger placement, electrical capacity and enough reserve vehicles to maintain reliable service. A fleet using roughly 15 buses each day cannot operate without backups for maintenance, charger failures and changing assignments.

Grants will likely offset much of the cost of buses and charging infrastructure, while electricity used for charging can generate revenue from Low Carbon Fuel Standard credits. The contract details will determine who owns the chargers, receives grant funding and LCFS revenue, pays utility costs, and retains publicly funded infrastructure if Durham is no longer the operator.

Those decisions will determine whether electrification becomes a lasting District asset or simply another contractor expense.

Now, my child does not think about fare recovery, vehicle-trip reduction, passenger information, route capacity, charging infrastructure, or LCFS credits when the bus arrives.

He sees his driver, his friends, and one of the best parts of his day.

I believe in school transportation because I have seen what it does for the community. I understand the operational and public value of moving children together rather than adding more cars to already constrained roads, and I know the personal value of watching my son gain independence, build relationships with his drivers, and look forward to the trip every day.

For families considering the bus this year, LBUSD’s transportation webpage is an excellent place to begin. The larger goal should be a system that is safe, reliable, well-funded, and flexible enough to meet changing student needs, while giving more children access to school and their community without every trip depending on a parent behind the wheel.

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