I'm already 17 years old and I still don't have my driver's license. Ever since I turned 15 I've said that I would take Driver's Ed ASAP, and each go around something in my schedule would conflict. So I put it off. My mom kept pushing me to learn how to drive and I kept worming out of it.

Now I finally am taking Driver's Ed (to the chagrin of my high school junior pride) and am out driving nearly every night, urgently trying to make up for lost time. Why the sudden change of heart? The realization that I might not have any other way to get to school next year.

The Seattle Public School District is currently staring down the barrel of a $20.7 million annual deficit and desperate to save money. One of the departments the district plans to send through the wringer is transportation. How much to cut back on buses is still up for debate.

The law requires schools to provide transportation for special education and homeless students, but nothing protects anyone else. In Seattle, families have the rare ability to choose which school to attend rather than being assigned to neighborhood schools. I am one of the many students who have chosen not to attend a neighborhood school. Garfield High School is in the central district, about half an hour away by school bus. Both of my parents work in the mornings, and, as of yet, I can't legally drive myself.

A huge number of my friends are facing similar circumstances (many of those that can drive don't own vehicles). The School Board has proposed that students should use the Metro bus system. They hope that Metro Transit will offer to provide free passes to students for their travel to and from school. The problem with that solution is commute time.

It can take me anywhere from 30 to 80 minutes to get home from school by Metro bus. That's a difference of almost an hour. After school, the unpredictable nature of the Metro bus system isn't a significant issue. Before school, that level of irregularity could cause me to miss first period entirely. If I allow for traffic, late busses and whatnot, then I have the possibility of arriving at school nearly an hour early. By itself that isn't anything noteworthy, but when I am extremely lucky to be getting six hours of sleep a night, every minute that I could have spent sleeping is a minute lost.

Things are only going to worsen when all of Garfield's population moves to Lincoln High School next year due to renovation. That will add another 10-20 minutes by car to the commute of everyone not living on the north end of Seattle. If I have to take the Metro bus to Lincoln next year, I will have to catch my first bus at 5:52am and transfer twice - waiting alone in the cold dark morning for my next bus - to arrive just in time to get to my first class before the tardy bell. That adds an extra hour to my pre-school morning routine.

To nip that punctual problem in the bud, the School Board is also proposing to retract a student's ability to choose which school to attend by assigning everyone to only neighborhood schools. While this does mostly eradicate the transportation problem, it would drastically lower the amount of hard earned racial and cultural integration in schools and dissolve education honor programs such as Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate. True, many schools would try, or pretend, to infuse their education system with higher levels of education, but a school can only go so far if they don't have the numbers necessary to justify the creation of these high level programs.

Many parents, already freaked by the possibility of forced neighborhood schooling and disenchanted with the caliber of present public education, are sending their children to private schools or even moving.

My friends and I agree that the quality of education is weakening. Even though there is little funding to pay for new textbooks or creative and alternative approaches to education, it does not follow that transportation should be dealt the fatal blow. The only real solution, besides parents chipping in wherever possible, is the state government finally stepping up and doing something about Seattle's dying education system.

You can't squeeze money out of the Seattle School District anymore than you can squeeze water from a rock.

Kyra-lin Hom writes ever other week in these newspapers and can be reached at kl_hom@yahoo.com