Dallas students still waiting for City’s free DART rides initiative

Story by Christian Williams and Ta’Dondrian Crayton

Last summer the City of Dallas announced that starting in January 2024, it would pilot a program allowing students to ride for free around town in buses and trains via Dallas Area Rapid Transit, or DART.

This summer, however, when Dallas Free Press’ high school interns tried to access these free or “fareless” rides, we learned that they don’t exist because the City, Dallas ISD and DART disagree on how it should work and who should pay for it.

Dallas ISD: Millions of dollars committed to DART transportation, a fraction spent

For years, Dallas ISD has set aside budget money so that students who need to use DART to travel to or from school can receive passes. A board document from October 2021 states that the board voted to commit up to $1 million between 2021 and 2023 to DART passes for students for whom the district’s buses are “not a feasible method of providing transportation.”

Over two years, however, the district spent only $196,556 on DART passes — less than one-fifth of the money the board committed.

We reached out to DISD District 8 Trustee Joe Carreón via email with questions, and Demetrius R. Mullins in the district’s transportation department responded. He says that right now, “campuses must fill out a monthly DART bus pass request form for Dallas ISD students that meet the following requirements”:

• Homeless students
• School is more than two miles away with no bus stop
• Hazardous traffic area
• High risk of violence area

“Student Transportation Services only issues DART bus passes to students that qualify,” Mullins said in an email. “DART bus passes are ordered monthly and delivered to 5151 Samuell Blvd. The community liaison or one of their assistant principals picks up DART passes and gives the passes to the students.”

We could not find information on the Dallas ISD website or campus websites on how students can request these free DART passes. Our high school interns also were not familiar with this resource through their experiences as students at Dr. L.G. Pinkston and the “Great” James Madison high schools.

In the summer of 2023, the board voted to approve a $500,000 commitment on student DART passes from 2023-2027 — twice as long and half as much as their 2021 budget approval.

City of Dallas: Support and dedicated funds for ‘fareless student ridership,’ no action yet

City Council passed a resolution in May 2022 supporting “development and implementation of a Student Transit Program offering free fares for kindergarten through twelfth-grade students on DART’s bus and rail transit system.”

“The opportunity to remove barriers to accessing school, work and extra-curricular could be transformative for our community,” West Dallas’ District 6 Councilman Omar Narvaez said in a statement. Narvaez also chairs the council’s Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.

Then in summer 2023, the City of Dallas allocated $250,000 to a “Student Ridership Pilot Program.” Based on existing DART fare policy, City staff determined that the program could serve either “260 K-12 students for an entire year (based upon $960 for a local annual pass),” or “1,302 middle school and high school students for one semester (based upon $192 for individual, semester passes).” Staff recommended the latter at the Sept. 18, 2023 Transportation and Infrastructure Committee meeting.

Dallas City Councilman Jesse Moreno, a Dallas ISD alumnus who is now a Dallas ISD parent, says that Dallas ISD provides students with transportation to and from school, but students who stay for extracurriculars might not have a way to get back home. 

“We know that the campus administrators are going to have the best relationship with students on those campuses,” Moreno says, “and we’re relying on them to help identify individuals who can benefit from this, but also making sure that students can go to their counselors and say, ‘Hey, I’m interested in getting one of these tickets.’” 

We asked Moreno to sit down with us because he had been heavily involved in the discussions with Dallas ISD and DART on the pilot program. 

“We wanted DART to just pay for it,” Moreno says. “Any student with just a simple ID, they should just be able to get on any public transportation. And they said no.”

DART: Reduced fares for students but no free rides

“Currently there is no program or initiative that subsidizes all transportation costs for students,” DART spokeswoman Anna Kurian told us in response to our email, but “students (ages 5-high school) qualify for reduced fares — 50% off the base fare.”

“Essentially,” Kurian says, “the student must be attending school full-time within the DART service area and can supply a current student ID.”

Students or parents who fill out this online form can receive a Reduced Fare GoPass Tap Card ID to use for travel to and from school, work or extracurricular activities. Kurian says this can be used on DART buses, light rail, TRE and GoLink, but not paratransit service.

At a recent DART reporter roundtable, DART CEO Nadine Lee noted the $250,000 the City of Dallas allocated for the free K-12 student pilot program “was not close to being enough.”

“It wouldn’t have been possible to provide a free pass for all students, or even grade nine through 12 students, with that little amount of money,” Lee says. “Given all the things we’re trying to do to improve services for people, we don’t have the financial capacity to use any more resources to subsidize 100% any passes for people because our revenues are just too important. We have too many things we have to do.”

The focus of the roundtable was DART’s new 10-year strategic plan, the focus of which is “to move DART from being a service that people sometimes use, to being a valued regional economic and mobility asset.”

At the roundtable, DART noted that the largest chunk of its budget comes from sales tax revenues. Only a percentage of its revenue comes from passenger fares, and a small fraction of that comes from student riders, according to an early 2022 presentation made to the appointed DART Board of Directors as they were discussing a K-12 pass program. Since April 2022, the topic of a K-12 DART pilot hasn’t appeared on any DART board agendas.

Additional reporting by Keri Mitchell