With tighter education budgets for support service, some districts must consider other means of providing transportation service for students with disabilities. Some districts have used creative strategies, such as optimizing class locations, sharing service with other districts, using other modes of transportation, and consulting transportation staff when deciding student class placements. All these strategies are laudable, but they are not the only options. If districts can teach students with special emotional, mental, and learning needs the skills necessary to ride the same buses as their nondisabled peers, special transportation may eventually be unnecessary as a related--and very costly--service. That is, if students can access the education program in the same manner as their nondisabled peers, they will no longer require special-education bus service. For this new transportation paradigm to succeed, districts must be able to offer increasingly more independent levels of bus service that correspond to the students' levels of skills mastery. As educators implement this model, transportation service actually becomes part of the education process. Not only do school buses safely deliver students to school ready to learn, they deliver students who have learned on the way to school. By changing the way they think about transportation, districts can reduce routes, improve service, and teach student life skills. (Contains 1 table.)