The new Kids Ride Free card looks like a regular SmarTrip on the front, but has distinguishing markings on the back. (Lara McCoy / WAMU)

Public school officials in D.C. have underestimated the demand for new SmartTrip cards for students, which could leave many kids stranded at Metro stations and bus stops next week.

Starting Monday, students will no longer be able to use their D.C. One Cards — a type of city-issued identification — to ride Metrobus, Metrorail and the D.C. Circulator free of charge. Instead, they’ll need special Kids Ride Free SmarTrip cards, which are distributed by District officials and school leaders. The District made the change to the SmarTrip cards because the D.C. One Cards were not originally designed to be used as transit cards.

The change is causing frustration for schools that don’t have enough cards to give students. Mary Shaffner, the principal at DC International Charter School (DCI) in Northwest Washington, says she has repeatedly asked the city for cards she has yet to receive. Her school has over 1,060 students, and as of Monday evening, the students have received 448 cards from the District Department of Transportation. Officials say they sent out 125 more cards today, still leaving Shaffner short more than 400 cards.

“We need the balance so our kids can get to school because the majority of them take public transportation,” Shaffner says. “It cost a lot of money to come from Wards 7 and 8 to DCI. Those kids will have to pay, and maybe they don’t have the funds to pay for that. We have heard parents say that, ‘my kid is going to miss school because we can’t afford to do this everyday.’”

DCI parent Susanne Horn is one of those.

“That’s going to be a really expensive commute if you we going to pay it out of pocket,” says Horn, who expects her sixth-grade son will need to pay $4-$5 a day to get back and forth from class.

D.C. City Administrator Rashad Young says his office initially ordered 32,000 cards, an estimate they developed after looking at the number of students (25,697) who utilized DC One cards for transportation in the 2017-18 school year. Then, after requests from schools they ordered 10,000 more cards last week, all of which have been distributed to schools. He says his office did not order enough for every public and public charter student in the District — more than 90,000 kids — because he wanted to focus on kids they thought would “need or use” the cards, noting that it “didn’t make sense” to do otherwise.

“We assumed more kids would take advantage of [the program] when we switched to the SmarTrip card because it is in fact easier, which is what we want to do, make this as simple as possible,” Young says. “What we are finding with some schools is that they are not distributing the cards at hand because they think they need more. They want to have all of them at once in order to give them out. But when they are telling us, ‘I need 100 more cards. I need 200 more cards,’ we are delivering those cards. There is no shortage of cards. We want to make sure that people who need the benefit, get the benefit.”

Young says because this is a new process, he expects a transition period where issues can be worked out. But parents and school leaders are not comforted by the Oct. 1 deadline to start using the SmarTrip cards, saying that they need more time to ensure that all students who need cards get them.

As of Monday evening, Young says the deadline has not changed, and moving it would require an agreement between multiple city agencies.

This story originally appeared on WAMU.