Figuring out how to get kids to and from school has always been a hassle, but with the return of in-person class and a shaky back-to-the-office situation, the usual fall headache has become more acute.

For many parents who are still working from home or attempting hybrid arrangements, meetings are starting earlier, making the morning crunch even more stressful. Now that bosses have less visibility into their employees’ blurred home/work lives, it isn’t always clear whether the day’s first Zoom meeting conflicts with school drop-offs.

This year, Megan Harper has three kids attending three different schools. She spends over an hour dropping each of them off in the mornings. Her husband picks them up in the afternoons.

Although she works for herself doing marketing and event planning, she has a client in the U.K. who sometimes needs to speak with her right in the middle of the get-to-school crunch. “Sometimes my husband has to be on morning duty and I’m on afternoon duty, depending on who has meetings when,” she said.

Having recently moved from New York to Charlotte, N.C., Ms. Harper said she didn’t look into carpooling with other families, because she doesn’t know any parents well enough yet to trust them with driving her kids.

Her school district offers bus service, but the route past their house means her son would have to spend 35 minutes on the bus. “He’s not a morning person and that just didn’t seem fair,” Ms. Harper said. One daughter attends a charter school and the other attends preschool—and buses aren’t offered for either girl.

Buses actually aren’t a viable option in many places. A national bus driver shortage, exacerbated by Covid-19, has led many school districts to condense routes, and budget constraints have caused some to eliminate buses altogether.

As a result, parents have begun turning to regional app-based children’s ride services such as Buggy, RubiRides and HopSkipDrive. They’re also networking with other school families via carpool apps like CarpooltoSchool and KidCar.

“We’re expecting to see a surge this fall,” said Kimberly Moore, chief executive officer of Go Together, the developer of CarpooltoSchool. Schools pay an annual subscription fee and offer the app free to parents. For an extra charge, the app maker can conduct background checks on all parent, guardian or grandparent drivers. Ms. Moore said over the summer she has seen a 50% increase in the number of requests for app demos, compared with pre-pandemic times.

Ryan, Ms. Gonzalez’s 5-year-old son, rides home from school in a van operated by a service called Buggy.

Photo: Saul Martinez for The Wall Street Journal

Tech can help solve the logistics problem, but there’s also the question of whether ride-sharing is safe while the Covid-19 Delta variant is surging.

“We’re in Miami, so we’re straddling two political viewpoints,” said Isabel Berney, CEO of Buggy, which transports children to school and activities in Mercedes Sprinter vans. “We serve schools that have made national headlines for not believing in social distancing, vaccines and masks, and schools where parents are more cautious and want our drivers to be vaccinated and masked.”

Ms. Berney said that most of the drivers have been vaccinated without her asking and she’s offering financial incentives for those who haven’t. She requires all drivers, and all passengers over age 3, to be masked, with the exception of one van serving a school that isn’t mandating masks. Buggy installed filtration systems in the front and back of its vans, and plexiglass barriers between the driver and the children. Hand sanitizer is offered to kids when they board, and the vans are sterilized after each route.

Due to the extra costs—including extra pay to attract and retain drivers—Buggy has increased its fare by $2, to $17 per one-way trip up to 9 miles. Longer trips cost extra. Parents must commit to the service for a full school year and pay a $149 registration fee, at which time they schedule their kids’ rides out two weeks.

Demand for the service has grown, Ms. Berney said, as parents have felt more stretched with uncertain work conditions and as other transportation options withered. Buggy launched in 2019 with one van and now has 26 serving nearly 250 kids; there are more than 350 parents on a wait list. Ms. Berney said that a big barrier to growth has been drivers testing positive for Covid-19. When it happens, she has to find more drivers just to fill existing routes. A shortage of Sprinter vans, part of the RV craze, has also been a problem.

Cheryl Gonzalez, a small-business owner in Miami, began using Buggy last school year to transport her 5-year-old son home from school. She takes him and her 2-year-old daughter to school in the mornings and a neighbor drives her daughter home.

“It’s a cobbled-together mix of solutions,” said Ms. Gonzalez, whose office is more than 30 minutes away from her home and her kids’ schools, and whose husband travels frequently for work. “I had explored a bunch of different bus options, but because this was tech-enabled, it gave me peace of mind because it has monitoring components.” Buggy lets parents track their kids’ routes, and has a special parent app that streams live footage of the kids in the van.

Even with that level of visibility, there can be issues. Last spring, a driver attempted to pick up Ms. Gonzalez’s son from school in her own car, without a car seat. The principal called Ms. Gonzalez, who immediately left work to get him. Ms. Berney said she terminated that driver. “Our number-one priority is kids’ safety,” she said.

Ms. Gonzalez said she hasn’t had any problems since and will continue using the service.

Jay Sorensen found herself stuck when the family she relied on last year to drive her son to and from school switched schools for this fall. “I was worried I’d have to send him to school in a taxi,” said Ms. Sorensen, a federal government employee who doesn’t drive due to a visual impairment. She turned to an online parents’ forum in Washington, D.C., and learned about RubiRides.

Its founder, Noreen Butler, a fellow single mom, said she has seen an increase in demand among work-from-home parents. “A lot of parents now need to be behind their computers by 8 a.m.,” she said. Her service has more than 90 families signed up in Washington, D.C., Maryland and Virginia.

The service requires a monthly subscription of $15 plus $25 per one-way trip for the first 5 miles and $2 for each additional mile. (The monthly fee is waived for new users and for frequent riders.) It assigns families three drivers, so they always get a driver they know.

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Drivers use their own cars and are given sanitizers to wipe down seat belts and door handles after each ride. Once a week, the drivers have to take their cars to a local dealership to be fully disinfected. Ms. Butler requires all drivers to be vaccinated, and for both drivers and passengers to wear masks.

But kids’ ride-hailing services aren’t a universal solution—these services are concentrated in big cities. Uber and Lyft aren’t supposed to give rides to unaccompanied minors, though some parents still order them for their teens anyway.

As for Ms. Harper, the move from New York to North Carolina means she has fewer ride-sharing or carpool-app options to choose from, but she hasn’t ruled it out. “If it was available, I’d probably use it,” she said.

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Write to Julie Jargon at julie.jargon@wsj.com