Follow the diesel, follow the money, follow the right all the way to the curb.
Oct 17, 2026
The Billboard
I was driving through Utica when I saw it: a big, bright billboard with a school bus on it. Michigan school districts could pay an extra $29 million in diesel fuel to bus our kids to school. Your tax dollars, burning in the tank.
I knew that sign, because my friend helped put it up. It grew out of a project she built for her job, and all of the data behind it lives on their site: busfare.walletshock.org.¹ If you want the full picture of what she found, start there. Her work is the foundation of everything in this piece.
It sparked something in me, and I couldn’t leave it alone. Regular readers know I’ve been following one thread for a long time: how rights get dismantled from the inside, with no repeal and no vote, just a quiet decision to stop showing up. I wrote about it in “The Doom Loop,” in “The Conveyor Belt,” and in “We Didn’t Get Here By Accident.”² I recognized the shape right away.
And I know who gets hit hardest when that happens. The disabled community is already under attack by this administration, and we know what the fight for access has cost us. The 504 sit-ins. ADAPT activists blocking city buses to demand the right to ride. I won’t retell that history here; it’s in “We Didn’t Get Here By Accident,” and it’s worth your time. All you need to know now is that a bus has never been a small thing to us.
So I started digging. This is what I found, on top of her work.
Three Views of One Problem
My friend built her site so you can look at the problem three different ways, and each way tells a different story about who gets hurt.
Her first view measures the extra diesel cost against each district’s own budget. That’s the one that shows which districts can least afford the hit, and it points straight at rural Michigan. Long routes, small budgets, nothing to spare.
Her second view is the raw dollar increase. Here the big suburban districts rise to the top, and Utica comes out highest, at roughly $600,000 more.
Her third view spreads the cost across students, using the most recent full-time enrollment counts. That one turned up something she didn’t expect: a corridor of higher per-student costs running along the big suburban communities of I-96. She hasn’t been able to explain it, and neither have I yet. If you work in school transportation and have a theory, I want to hear it.
Then there’s the comparison layer. Her site sets the cost against what the state is sending districts for each student next year, which it pegs at $10,300, and against what else that money could buy, using national median figures. Put plainly, the diesel bill isn’t an abstraction. It’s measured in students’ worth of funding that won’t reach a classroom.
That’s her work. Here’s where I picked it up.
What Gets Cut First
Start with the price. As of October 14, AAA puts Michigan’s average diesel at $6.48 a gallon. A year ago it was $3.65.³ That’s about $2.83 more for every gallon a bus burns, and a bus burns a lot of them.
Nationally, district leaders are already saying so. A survey of school administrators this spring, run by the groups that represent superintendents, school business officials, and transportation coordinators, found that 56% of responding districts were over budget on fuel. About 40% were consolidating routes, and another 25% were reducing the number of routes. More than a third expected to dip into their reserves if prices held.⁴ (It’s a snapshot, 188 responses collected in early May, and districts reported they had mostly kept the cuts away from classrooms so far.)
“So far” is the part that matters. Here in Michigan, Grass Lake Community Schools in Jackson County runs a two-route system on a transportation budget of just over a million dollars. The district did the responsible thing and built a 5% cushion for fuel into this year’s budget. Their superintendent told WILX that costs are running significantly above it.⁵ And the money to cover the gap has to come from somewhere, which means programs and the general fund.
That’s a small district doing everything right and still coming up short. Now multiply it by every district that didn’t have a cushion at all.
Then ask who’s coming to help. On October 5, the White House put out an order loosening rules on dyed diesel and deferring some fuel excise taxes through year-end.⁶ On October 12, Governor Whitmer signed a state energy emergency order, effective through December 31 at the latest. Michigan’s order covers only vehicles with farm or wood harvester plates.⁷ School buses aren’t in it. Farmers and loggers got relief. The kids’ ride to school didn’t.
It’s the pattern again. The pressure lands, and the people closest to it are left to absorb it.
Who Is Actually On That Bus
Not every kid on a school bus is riding because of a law. Some are. Under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, transportation is a “related service.” If a child’s IEP says they need it, the district has to provide it, at no cost to the family.⁸ That can mean door-to-door pickup, a lift or ramp, a harness, a vehicle aide, or a ride time kept short enough for a child who can’t tolerate a long trip. The IEP is the legal document. The bus is how it happens.
That’s the part I want you to sit with. A right to a free, appropriate public education doesn’t mean anything to a child who can’t get to the building. The bus is where a right on paper turns into a body in a seat, and it depends on things that cost money: a working lift, a trained aide, a route that doesn’t add forty minutes to a medically fragile kid’s morning.
Now go back to what districts are doing when fuel eats the budget. Consolidating routes. Cutting the number of routes. Putting more kids on fewer buses. Those are reasonable moves for a general route. For a student whose IEP spells out the ride, they are not simple adjustments. They are exactly the changes that collide with what a child’s plan requires.
I’m not saying districts are breaking the law today. I’m saying the pressure is arriving at the place where the law is easiest to quietly bend.
Who Is Supposed to Catch It
So say a child’s bus doesn’t come. Or the lift is broken, or the aide was cut, or the ride is now ninety minutes. Who do you call?
Here’s the map. In June, the Education Department signed agreements to have HHS run day-to-day oversight of special education and DOJ handle civil rights enforcement.⁹ Congress didn’t vote on it. IDEA is still the law, and the Education Department remains legally responsible. But the offices a family would turn to have been split across agencies that never did this work before.
Then there’s the Section 504 side. In September, a federal court approved a settlement in Texas v. Kennedy that stripped integration requirements out of the HHS regulations.¹⁰ It applies to HHS-funded programs and doesn’t change the statute itself, and it’s not a ruling about school buses. But look at what led up to it. In June, a DOJ legal opinion argued that neither the ADA nor Section 504 contains a standalone integration mandate in how states treat people with mental disabilities, and the government stopped defending what it had defended for decades.¹¹
Then there’s the money. The president’s FY27 budget asks Congress for more in basic state grants for special education, while zeroing out the separate lines for preschool grants and the national programs that fund teacher training and parent support, folding them into a general pot. Congress rejected the same move last year. It’s a proposal, not a done deal.¹² But notice the shape: the headline number goes up while the protected lines underneath get dissolved.
None of this repeals a single right. The right to a bus ride survives on paper. What’s being rearranged is who answers the phone.
The Pattern
I’ve been tracing this shape for months. In “The Doom Loop,” it was a housing memo telling enforcement staff to stop enforcing. In “The Conveyor Belt,” it was demonize first, then defund from within. The mechanism is never a ban. It’s an exit.
This time, it just happens to be parked outside a school.
The Curb
In 1990, an eight-year-old girl pulled herself up the Capitol steps on national television and told the world she’d take all night if she had to. Four months later, the ADA was law.¹³
Think about what that was. A child, in plain sight, refusing to be invisible. Everything this administration is doing runs the other way. No vote, no hearing, no cameras. Just a quiet instruction to stop showing up, so that when a kid is left standing at a curb, there’s nobody on the other end of the phone and nothing on the record.
So we make it visible. That’s the whole job.
Here’s what that looks like this month:
- Ask your district’s transportation director what diesel is doing to the budget, and how many riders have transportation written into an IEP. Ask what happens to those routes if the money runs short.
- Go to a school board meeting and put the question on the record. A question asked in public is a question that can’t be ignored.
- Call your state legislators. Delaware has moved to write the earlier 504 protections into state law so they don’t depend on Washington.¹⁴ Ask why Michigan hasn’t.
- Go look at the data yourself: https://busfare.walletshock.org/Find your district. Then tell someone what you found.
A right on paper is only as strong as the people who show up for it. The people who built this movement blocked buses with their bodies to prove that point. I don’t think we’ve forgotten how.
The bus is coming either way. The only question is whether everyone gets on it.
Sources
- Bus fare data and methodology:
https://busfare.walletshock.org
- Miss-Information, “We Didn’t Get Here By Accident,” “The Doom Loop,” “The Conveyor Belt” (Substack, hippie1984.substack.com)
- AAA, Michigan average fuel prices, diesel $6.4801 current, $3.6455 year ago (pulled October 14, 2026):
https://gasprices.aaa.com/?state=MI
- AASA, “How Rising Diesel Costs Are Squeezing District Budgets”: https://www.aasa.org/resources/blog/cross-post–how-rising-diesel-costs-are-squeezing-district-budgets and K-12 Dive, “War-fueled diesel prices send district budgets soaring”: https://www.k12dive.com/news/war-fueled-diesel-prices-send-district-budgets-soaring/820638/
- WILX, “Rising fuel costs strain Mid-Michigan school transportation budgets” (August 12, 2026): https://www.wilx.com/2026/08/12/rising-fuel-costs-strain-mid-michigan-school-transportation-budgets/
- Executive order “Emergency Tax Relief on Diesel Fuel,” signed October 5, 2026. Coverage:
- Michigan Executive Order 2026-15 (October 12, 2026): https://www.michigan.gov/whitmer/news/state-orders-and-directives/2026/10/12/executive-order-no-2026-15-declaration-of-state-of-energy-emergency and Michigan Advance: https://michiganadvance.com/2026/10/12/whitmer-temporarily-suspends-penalties-for-farmers-and-loggers-using-dyed-diesel-on-the-highway/
- IDEA regulations, definition of related services including transportation, 34 CFR 300.34
- Michigan Advance, “Special ed, civil rights to be shifted out of Trump’s shrinking Department of Education” (June 16, 2026): https://michiganadvance.com/2026/06/16/repub/special-ed-civil-rights-to-be-shifted-out-of-trumps-shrinking-department-of-education/
- Pennsylvania Providers Association on Texas v. Kennedy: https://www.paproviders.org/federal-court-vacates-section-504-provisions-related-to-community-integration and ACLU statement: https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/national-disability-organizations-condemn-the-federal-governments-abandonment-of-its-commitment-to-community-integration-for-people-with-disabilities-as-approved-by-the-court-in-texas-v-ken
- LeadingAge on the DOJ position: https://leadingage.org/doj-seeks-to-vacate-disability-integration-mandate-raising-concerns-for-community-based-services/ and Florida Phoenix (October 4, 2026): https://floridaphoenix.com/2026/10/04/repub/after-states-sue-trump-administration-walks-away-from-disability-rights-enforcement/
- K-12 Dive, “Trump proposes FY27 boost for special education”: https://www.k12dive.com/news/trump-proposes-fy27-boost-for-special-education-advocates-worry-about-accountability/817308/
- Miss-Information, “Why We Have the Month”
- IBTimes, on the 504 integration rules and Delaware’s state law: https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/judge-vacates-section-504-integration-rules-1823385